Shopify's Harley Finkelstein on 29% GMV growth to $378B and building rails for agentic commerce

Summary

Shopify reported $378 billion in gross merchandise volume (29% growth) and $11.5 billion in revenue (30% growth) for 2025, holding 14% of U.S. e-commerce market share. The company generated $2 billion in cash flow while building what President Harley Finkelstein calls the infrastructure for agentic commerce.

Shopify co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google, allowing merchants to sell through ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and other AI platforms via agentic storefronts. Glossier, Spanx, Viore, Stanley, and Steve Madden are already live. AI-driven search traffic on Shopify's platform jumped 15x year-over-year from January 2025 to January 2026, though Finkelstein notes the channel remains early.

Finkelstein positions 2026 as the start of a new wave of billion-dollar brands built on AI. His argument rests on a single architectural claim: AI will reshape how customers discover and buy products, but it will not remake the transaction infrastructure itself. Shopify's core strength has always been the back office—inventory, taxes, analytics, payments, fraud prevention—not the storefront. "AI will rewrite interfaces," he says. "It will not rewrite the transaction contract." That durability insulates Shopify from narratives where AI commoditizes software layers.

The company is also seeing enterprise migration. General Motors, Estée Lauder, and other legacy retailers are consolidating fragmented commerce stacks onto Shopify to unify online, offline, social, and agentic channels.

Shopify rolled out Sidekick, an AI cofounder embedded in the admin, and Pulse, which makes proactive AI recommendations and executes them autonomously when approved. A jewelry merchant used Pulse to bundle four separate SKUs and saw immediate sales lift. SimGym, announced in December, simulates outcomes of design or campaign changes.

Finkelstein argues that the moat for direct-to-consumer entrepreneurs is shifting from distribution expertise to access to intelligence and operating leverage. Merchants can now choose natural-language AI agents for those without commerce experience, or deep code access for brands like Skims and Alo Yoga that want full customization. The old binary between building it yourself or hiring an agency breaks down. More people start businesses, and they scale faster.

On AI adoption more broadly, Finkelstein rejects doom narratives. He cites CEO Toby Lütke's internal hiring principle—bring on humans only if AI cannot do the job better—as pragmatic adoption, not recklessness. His own earnings prep now pulls from Shopify Vault using a dozen MCPs instead of ad-hoc interviews with product leaders, making subsequent conversations richer and more specific. He frames AI as an exoskeleton for human capability. "The mainstream will use it," he says, invoking Geoffrey Moore's chasm-crossing framework. "We're still underselling the opportunity with AI."

The underlying tension is real: Shopify is a system of record in a world where interfaces are about to become fluid. Finkelstein's confidence rests on a simpler fact. Someone has to own inventory, payments, and the back office. That someone is Shopify.