Shopify's chief operating officer Jess Hertz gave a rare, detailed look at how one of the biggest e-commerce companies is running its own business through the AI shift, and the numbers are worth pausing on.
The company just closed its fifth straight quarter of revenue growth above 30 percent. Almost all of that revenue, close to 90 percent, comes from merchants who have been on the platform for over a year. That tells you the core business is compounding on itself, not being propped up by a wave of new sign-ups.
What stands out more is the staffing story behind it. Shopify's workforce has sat flat for more than two years, hovering around 7,600 to 7,900 people, after the company cut its staff by roughly 10 percent in 2022 and another 20 percent in 2023. Since then, revenue has kept climbing while the headcount line barely moves.
That is the exact outcome every executive hopes AI spending will produce, and Shopify is one of the few companies with the quarterly numbers to back up the claim rather than just the ambition. Hertz says her engineers can use AI coding tools with almost no spending restrictions, at a moment when other companies are nervous about pouring money into AI subscriptions without seeing a clear return. Her answer is that the return already shows up in the operating numbers, so the company treats it as a cost worth carrying rather than a risk to control.
The more consequential part of the interview is about what Shopify is building for its two million-plus merchants. As shoppers start asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot to find and buy products directly, Shopify built a system called Catalog that feeds those AI tools clean, accurate product data instead of leaving them to scrape a merchant's website. According to Shopify, shoppers who arrive through an AI agent using that clean data convert at roughly double the rate of those coming through agents relying on scraped information.
That is a real, measurable reason for any online seller to care about how their product data is structured, regardless of which platform they sell on. Shopify also co-built an open standard called the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google, aimed at letting any AI agent transact with any merchant using one common setup instead of custom integrations for every AI platform. This is Shopify positioning itself as the plumbing underneath the AI shopping boom rather than betting on any single AI company staying on top.
That bet looks smart next to the competition's stumbles. OpenAI's Instant Checkout, launched with much fanfare last year, was quietly scaled back this spring after merchants resisted giving up control of the checkout experience and shoppers found the product selection too thin. Amazon, meanwhile, sued Perplexity over its AI shopping agent accessing Amazon's site without permission, choosing to fight rather than open up.
Shopify's approach, plugging into every AI platform rather than picking a side, looks like the more durable strategy while everyone else argues over who gets to own the checkout. For any business selling online, the lesson is not about Shopify specifically. It is that businesses feeding AI agents clean, structured product information are already seeing better results than those hoping to get scraped correctly, and that gap will only widen.