Shopify just gave you an AI sales agent. Here's how to turn it on — and where it stops short.

If you sell on Shopify, you probably gained a handful of AI features this year without noticing. In 2026 Shopify rolled out tools that let AI help sell your products — both to shoppers on your own storefront and to the AI assistants your customers increasingly use to shop. Most merchants haven't switched them on, or don't know they're there. Here's the plain version: what they are, how to turn them on, and — honestly — where they leave you wanting.

What you actually got

Three things worth knowing about:

An on-site AI assistant. A sales helper that can answer shopper questions and point people toward products, right on your store — activated from your admin, no app to install.

Agentic sales channels. Shopify can feed your catalog to external AI — ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Shop — so when someone asks one of them what to buy, your products can surface and, increasingly, be purchased. This runs through Shopify's product Catalog.

A knowledge base. A helper that auto-generates answers about your store — shipping, returns, common product questions — for those agents to draw on.

How to turn them on

In your Shopify admin, look for the Agentic section under your sales channels, and your Online Store settings. Broadly, you'll want to make sure catalog access is enabled so agents can read your products, complete your store policies (terms, privacy, returns — agents literally read these to answer shopper questions), and accept the agentic terms. The exact names and locations are shifting as Shopify rolls this out in stages, and parts of it are US-first and gated by eligibility — so if you don't see a feature yet, check back or register your interest rather than assume you're missing out. It costs nothing, and it meets a real shift in how people shop, so it's worth doing.

Where it stops short

Here's the honest part. What you're getting is a generic agent — the same one every Shopify store gets. Three limits matter:

It only knows what's on your pages. The agent reads your product data and policies. If your listings don't say who a product is for, what size to get, or what it works with — and most listings don't — the agent can't tell a shopper either. It can't supply expertise that was never written down.

The native knowledge helper is shallow. Auto-generated answers are a fine start, but they tend to be thin or occasionally wrong, because they're generated from the same limited data your pages already hold.

There's no depth, and no differentiation. A one-size-fits-all agent treats a ski shop and a coffee roaster the same way. It doesn't know that a 178cm intermediate who rides groomers wants a different board than an advanced rider chasing powder. That category expertise — the thing that makes your shop yours — isn't something a generic agent brings to the conversation.

What to do about it

So: turn on the free tools — genuinely, do it. Then do the thing that actually moves the needle, which is to make your product knowledge legible. Add the fit, sizing, and who-it's-for details to your listings, starting with your best sellers. Fill in your policies and FAQs. That single effort makes both the native agent and the external ones dramatically better at selling for you — and it's free.

The harder gap — giving every shopper and every AI agent the deep, category-specific conversation your best salesperson would have — is exactly what we're building Sqrly to close. But you don't need us to start: the native tools cost nothing, and your product data is yours to fix today.

The bottom line

Shopify handing every merchant an AI agent is good news. It means the shift is real and the rails are being built for you. The question is no longer whether AI will sell your products — it's how well it understands them. Turn on what you've got, fix your data, and know where the generic stops.

Sqrly gives online retailers a sales agent that actually knows their products — for every shopper and every AI agent. Join the waitlist.