When AI agents do your shopping, everything changes, with Shopify’s Jess Hertz
Masters of Scale
- Published
- September 1, 2026
- Duration
- 29:52
- Summary source
- description
- Last updated
- Sep 1, 2026
Discusses agents.
Summary
For decades, e-commerce rewarded the biggest brands who could buy their way to the top of search results. AI is changing that. Shopify COO Jess Hertz joins Rapid Response to share what Shopify's data reveals about the agentic shopping revolution in real time, and how the company is building the infrastructure layer that makes products discoverable and pur…
Shopify COO Jess Hertz on navigating US-Canada trade tensions, why AI is shrinking the barrier to entrepreneurship, and how staying 'deeply unsentimental' fuels growth at one of commerce's biggest platforms.
Key takeaways
- Shopify's AI tool 'River' has run 275,000 sessions and taken 15 million actions in five months, demonstrating how internal AI agents can dramatically accelerate organizational velocity by reducing information transaction costs.
- Agentic AI is reshaping e-commerce discovery: 75% of AI-attributed orders last quarter came from categories outside the top 100, rewarding niche merchants through precision and personalization rather than keyword popularity or ad spend.
- Shopify kept headcount flat for 8+ consecutive quarters while growing revenue 34%, using AI-driven productivity gains rather than hiring as the primary growth lever.
Why this matters
Shopify's operational playbook—combining AI-native internal tooling, unsentimental culture, and agentic commerce infrastructure—offers a concrete blueprint for how platform businesses can scale revenue without scaling headcount in the AI era.
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When AI agents do your shopping, everything changes, with Shopify’s Jess Hertz
Masters of Scale
September 1, 2026
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Show notes
For decades, e-commerce rewarded the biggest brands who could buy their way to the top of search results. AI is changing that. Shopify COO Jess Hertz joins Rapid Response to share what Shopify's data reveals about the agentic shopping revolution in real time, and how the company is building the infrastructure layer that makes products discoverable and purchasable by AI. Plus, why Shopify's engineers can spend freely on AI tokens while the rest of the business world agonizes over ROI, and what it
Themes
- agents