Shopify

Shopify reported $2.84 billion of Q3 2025 revenue, up 32% year over year, and $264 million of operating profit. Alongside those figures came two multipliers: traffic to merchant stores originating from AI was up 7x since January 2025, and orders driven by AI-powered search up 11x. The company calls AI the biggest technology change since the Internet.

Harley Finkelstein, president, attributes the position to data from millions of merchants and billions of transactions plus fast product cycles. One internal tool, Scout, reads merchant feedback to inform product decisions.

Distribution is deliberately plural. Shopify's shopping capabilities sit inside OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot at once. It runs a full deployment of MCP-UI, which lets a merchant return sandboxed interface fragments instead of raw text, and it already implements custom CSS theming on top. Liad Yosef of Monday.com frames the stake plainly: a vendor sending only text loses its identity, because the chat decides the display.

In January 2026 at NRF, Sundar Pichai launched the Universal Commerce Protocol, Apache 2.0, co-developed with Shopify, Walmart, Target, Etsy, and Wayfair, with MCP among its four transports. Shopify authored it and uses it, while remaining plugged into ChatGPT, whose Stripe-backed Agentic Commerce Protocol is the rival standard.

Tobias Lütke leads the company and shows up on a separate axis entirely: QMD, the local markdown search engine he built, which Artem Zhutov wired into Claude Code to survive session amnesia.