What “The RenAIssance Edition” brings
The Shopify team called the new Winter ‘26 Edition The RenAIssance Edition. AI is clearly opening a new era - one that combines creativity with technology and redefines how online commerce is done. With more than 150 updates across the whole platform, the development teams focused on practical AI tools, agentic selling, extended B2B features and deeper integrations to grow your projects.
The updates span twelve areas: Sidekick, Agentic, Online, Retail, Marketing, Checkout, Operations, Shop app, B2B, Finance, Shipping and Developer.
If the topic interests you in detail, we recommend watching the edition launch recording on YouTube.
Sidekick AI
This is what caught our attention most. Not long ago we were cheering that an app could write product copy on its own thanks to “Shopify Magic”. Now it goes further - many of you have already found that Sidekick can do surprisingly much: advise you, find data, create a discount. And now comes the proactive Sidekick Pulse.
Meet Sidekick Pulse
A new, proactive phase of AI help in your store is here. Let’s quote Carl Rivera, the new Chief Design Officer, directly:
I really think this is a fundamental change in how software gets made. Until now software only reacted. Before you build software you need a plan, you have to give it clear instructions. You need all the ideas up front and tell it what to do, and only then does it start doing the clever things. With Sidekick Pulse, Shopify now becomes proactive. It’s as if it anticipates the things that are right for you, suggests them, and then goes and does them - it actually carries them out for you.
Many users already find it demonstrably useful to talk to Sidekick directly, given how deeply it’s wired into all the data. With the Pulse module, Sidekick now thinks for itself: it draws on what it knows about your store, your data, economic trends and everything Shopify knows about e-commerce in context, to give you concrete suggestions on what to improve - and it prepares the groundwork straight away, whether that’s proposed automations, discounts or email copy.
Tinker app
The app Shopify was still only announcing at the edition has since shipped. Tinker by Shopify brings together over 100 AI tools for creating images, videos and brand assets - product photography, logo design, social media video. Under the hood it runs models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, but you don’t pick by model: you pick what you want to make, describe it in a few words, and the app handles the rest.
It’s free (with monthly usage limits), needs iOS 16.4 or later and weighs 82 MB. You sign in with your email or straight through your Shopify account. It’s also available for Android on Google Play.
Agentic Commerce
Selling directly in AI channels
The changes presented in the Winter ‘26 Edition significantly widen the notion of agentic commerce - your products can now easily be made available and sold directly inside AI conversations on platforms such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot or Perplexity.
That means a new sales channel operating outside the classic website.
Rollouts & SimGym
Experiments and A/B testing
The integrated Rollouts and SimGym tools let you:
- run A/B tests of design changes or campaigns straight from the admin,
- simulate customer behaviour before shipping changes live.
That opens the way to faster and safer store improvements without external plugins.
B2B and catalogues
Better catalogue management and B2B tools
Other significant changes include:
- support for up to 2,048 variants per product,
- new B2B features such as fast company account creation and company-level credit management,
- broader control over pricing, collections and automatic discounts.
These upgrades improve scalability and commercial flexibility, especially on complex and enterprise projects.
And this isn’t remotely all of it
If “The RenAIssance Edition” caught your interest, take a look at the edition site - it’s excellent.
