“Every Hero Needs a Sidekick”
The Friday vibes are strong, futurists.
“Every hero needs a sidekick” is how Shopify founder Tobi Lütke announced their new GPT-integrated chatbot earlier this week. Speaking via a pre-recorded announcement video, the announcement promised a bevy of new features that allow a store operator to make changes without having to navigate the UI.
Among the features demonstrated were various natural-language commands:
- “Put my store on sale” — POOF, everything is 10% off.
- “Add surf boards to my homepage.” — KAPOW, a new content block appears
- “Why are my store sales down?” — BAM, it’s because of seasonality
“Sidekick helps you take things off your to-do list,” says Lütke.
Ostensibly, yes. For the solo founder and small Shopify store, Sidekick will deliver a ton of value. For everyone else — in particular, the enterprise — this is a new era of risk management.
As we covered in The Future is Non-Deterministic, the nature of LLM-based chatbots means that the outcomes are not able to be predicted and reliably tested. As a public company, Shopify will have to manage these risks for size and scale of a merchant that makes sense. While it makes sense to have a chatbot for explaining the trajectory of sales (Lütke claims that Sidekick is aware of “economic data”), it seems like an untenable level of risk for most organizations — especially the enterprise — to manage access control.
This is where I clued into the subtle messaging of the announcement. “Entrepreneurs are heroes,” was a deliberate choice. Not only is Shopify qualifying the intended audience for this announcement; but they are doing so by playing to their ego. A necessary approach due to the potentially disruptive nature of the innovation on the rest of the Shopify ecosystem.
Some industry insiders expressed concern to me privately. One individual, a developer, raised concerns about new levels of social engineering — but for the LLMs — to coax it to do things that are above access levels. Low-level employees may now be able to work around system limitations, gain access to insights and trends, or query account or customer history above their pay grade.
An app developer seemed excited, but concerned about the competition that Sidekick represents to the plugin ecosystem. Many marketing and promotion engines may be replaced with a mere pre-filled prompt in the chatbot, for instance. A quick response from Shopify’s President, Harley Finkelstein, seemed to address this concern as an afterthought:
“FYI: We’re building Sidekick with our developer community in mind. Sidekick won’t replace the Shopify App Store or apps, or Shopify devs. It’ll help give them another boost.”
Doesn’t Shopify need its developer ecosystem? Maybe. Let’s not forget that Shopify no longer takes a cut of revenue for plugin developers, up to $1M.
In this way, it seems like this was the ultimate end goal. This is the nature of all platforms — they eventually gobble up their own ecosystem. Eventually, you won’t need a UI to perform the functions that the developer community currently has commercialized.
And Shopify just made it free for everyone.
— Phillip
P.S. Concerned about heroes being replaced by sidekicks? Explore our Miro board on the topic of “human to machine dynamics” on this year’s VISIONS report. Sign up now and dive into our annual trends report.
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