AI is everything, and the Shopify Catalog is becoming the repository of product data for every merchant on the platform. That was the message when Tobi Lütke and Harley Finkelstein sat down for the opening fireside chat at DotDev 2026, Shopify's developer and partner event in Toronto this week. We were in the room. Here is what stuck with us, and what it means if you run a store or build for merchants.
The Unite 2017 story, and why it still matters
The chat opened with a story from Unite 2017, back when Shopify's partner conference filled a venue in San Francisco. Midway through the event, the entire city lost power. No lights, no AV, no sessions. So the conference spilled outdoors and turned into a garden party. Tobi and Harley tell it with real fondness, and not because everything went right. Because everything went wrong and the event got better.
That is the framing for everything Shopify is doing right now. The company treats disruption as raw material. And the rest of the conversation was about the biggest disruption commerce has ever seen.
Tobi on AI: live in everyone else's relative future
Tobi's advice for understanding AI is to live in everyone else's relative future. Use the tools that still feel like science fiction to most people until they feel routine to you. By the time the market catches up, you have years of reps.
He got specific: set up a personal AI agent and let it into your daily life. An OpenClaw-style setup is a fun way in, or a Hermes agent with persistent memory. His take on the models: they have gotten so good, especially Claude, that setup is the only real barrier left.
How far does he take it? Claude has access to his home network. When Tobi hurt his back recently, Claude turned the sauna on over WiFi without being asked. It also reads his heart rate and lines that up against his calendar to evaluate which meetings actually stress him. Not a demo. His daily setup.
The line that summed up the moment: everything that was impossible is now hard, hard is now easy, and expensive is now cheap. If you have been waiting for this technology to mature before engaging, that was the signal. For the merchant version of a personal agent, start with our guide to creating Claude agents for your store.
Great companies will be built on the Catalog API
Tobi said it plainly: great companies will be built on top of the Shopify Catalog API. We have been tracking Shopify's global product catalog since it was a quiet side project, and it is now the center of the platform. The Catalog API turns billions of products across millions of merchants into structured, queryable infrastructure for AI agents, and pairs with the Universal Commerce Protocol to carry an agent from discovery all the way through checkout.
The detail we keep thinking about: Tobi talked about products having soft details. Fashion, fit, style, the non-mathematical attributes that decide what people actually buy. Getting those into structured data is exactly what the Catalog is for, and it is why clean, rich product data keeps showing up as the highest-leverage work a merchant can do.
The Catalog is also moving fast. Features are landing constantly, the changelog is worth watching weekly, and Tobi made it clear he is personally leaning into this part of the platform. Access is self-serve now, just an API key. We ran through the latest wave in our Summer Editions agentic commerce recap.
River: Shopify runs on its own AI
One more signal from inside the company: River, Shopify's internal AI tool, is part of daily work for everyone there. What makes River interesting is not that it exists. It is that it works in public Slack channels, so every prompt, every result, and every workflow is visible across the company. Everyone learns from everyone's use.
We first covered River in our May AI updates roundup, and the takeaway holds: Shopify is not selling merchants an AI future it does not live in itself.
For partners: build systems of incentives
The advice for partners was refreshingly unflashy. The best things you can build are systems of incentives. Solve real problems for merchants, tie your success to theirs, and the rest compounds. No growth hacks, no land grabs. Incentives.
Zoom out and the equation from the stage was simple: opportunity plus tooling equals an explosion of creativity. The opportunity is agentic commerce. The tooling is the Catalog API, UCP, and models that finally hold up their end. What gets built over the next two years will look obvious in hindsight, the way the app ecosystem does now.
If you want to know what this means for your store specifically, that is the work we do at Ambaum. Start with a free Agentic Commerce Audit to see how visible your products are to AI agents, or explore our AI Enablement services. Tobi's advice was to live in the relative future. Ours: get your product data there first.
