Shopify's Harley Finkelstein: Universal Commerce Protocol with Google opens every AI agent to every merchant

to read before he comes on? Shopify. [music] Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social and on marketplaces and now with AI agents. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about. We have Harley from Shopify in the team at Ultra. How do we do?

That is Was that planned? It was amazing.

No, it's somewhat random, but we timed it up perfectly. But we're very excited.

Speaking of random, I've never done an interview in my life. I am at NRF, biggest retail show in the world. There are 40,000 people here. This is the Shopify booth behind me. There's going to be random people walking by Easter egg.

That's how it all started. That's how it all started right there.

I love it. I love it. So, you're in person, but today we're talking about

Where's NR? Where's NRF? Is that Vegas?

Javit Center.

Javit Center, New York City.

Cool.

Everyone, it's just it's sort of the the largest conference uh actually on the planet for retail and commerce. It used to be more about the traditional retailers, but um we've sort of hijacked it and made it about modern retail, direct to consumer technology companies.

You're kind of behind enemy lines there. I mean, you do have a POS system, so it makes sense.

We have a POS system, but actually and and and they've given me the keynote four years in a row, which is pretty cool. And today for my keynote, I brought up uh Emma from Skiims, which is amazing. Uh and and Ben Francis from Gym Shark. We talked about basically this idea that there will be more billion dollar brands built in the next 10 years than the last hundred years. Emma, I mean, thinky shark and skims. They're like 10 years old and they're so big.

Yeah. I mean, what's the key to building a billion dollar brand if you're starting in 2026? It feels like it's incredibly crowded and yet there's a new breakout brand every year. Uh what advice are you giving to people to get started other than just hop on Shopify?

There's multiple new breakouts and let that take out a lot of almost every vertical and and companies are growing. Uh the the the way the the bar has been set with with new e-commerce brands is insane. Like best in class is like okay you're doing 200 million in your second year.

I know exactly what you're talking about and there's so many examples of this and it just it just

you guys are hard graders doing $200 million. [laughter] No and no gong for that.

Of course we're of course we're hitting the gong for that.

So So let let me say something. Uh I brought on my my first time I was up on stage. I brought Richard from Mattel, Richard Dixon, who's now co of of the Gap because basically what he had figured out was that Mattel has this tre treasure trove of IP in their vault and he was like commercializing all of it. And so it just it was amazing that a company from 1945 I think uh was basically you know dominating. Uh the next year I brought uh Cat Cole from AG1.

Oh yeah. And obviously you guys know the story well but one skew $600 million, right? Like unbelievable. Another gong.

Another gong.

Uh, I mean, there's going to be a lot of gongs in this one. Uh, and then last year I brought

someone you know, Sarah Foster from Favorite Daughter, who has been on the show, who effectively, I mean, Sarah and Aaron created a hit Netflix show to sell more apparel and and succeeded with it. So, this idea that so I think one major thing if you look at all of these different incredible brands, what they've done is they didn't just take a bigger piece of an existing pie. They effectively were TAM creators. I mean, shapewear existed. There were companies like Spanx out there, but the way that Kim and and Emma built, you know, Skiims is totally different what Spanx is. It is like almost like a cool version of of an old school product. Um, and then we announced four big things which uh which I'm very proud of. The first is that it it's fairly [laughter] clear.

Sorry, John. Went down the wrong pipe.

Crazy. This show is is so unhinged. Also, it's the end of the show, I think. Right.

[laughter]

I'm like five Diet Cokes deep at this point. So, anything could happen. I haven't I just I didn't John was [laughter] doing such a good job keeping it together.

You got me. You got me.

That's okay. That's no problem. Sorry.

So, the first thing we announced was uh actually Sundar announced it yesterday on stage, but uh with Google, we are making it possible for every agent to connect to every single merchant. We created this protocol called Universal Commerce Protocol, which effectively is this universal language. It's open sourced so that all merchants can speak directly to every single one of the agents. And the best way to explain it is

up until now it was really just about like a single transaction. So I can buy something on chat GBT or Gemini or um or Microsoft.

You could only do like a single item at that time. It couldn't really

but there's no concept of loyalty or subscription or bundling or you know if it's furniture for example, please don't ship it to me on Thursday. I'm not home Thursday. Send it Friday. So this idea of creating this universal protocol that we we we co-developed with Google means that uh now merchants can actually tell these agents exactly how to show their products on these on these agentic tools and and it should be as good as it is on the online store. Uh so that's a that's that was a really really big one. The second thing we announced uh also with Google is that now we're actually expanding you can sell everywhere commerce is happening from an agentic perspective. So, we're going beyond the agentic storefronts of just chat GBT, which is what we said, you know, in Q3. Now, it's also we're going to be working with Gemini with um with AI um with AI mode in Google search and also with C-Pilot. And maybe the last one, which I wouldn't bring up on any other show than TVPN, is that uh we're actually bringing aentic commerce to every brand whether or not they're on Shopify. So, if you're not on Shopify, but you want to have your product syndicated and and index, you can do so with our aentic plan. And uh that seems to be the talk of the show, which is amazing.

Very interesting. Right. Right. Cuz that's that's uh

nice ecosystem. I like that.

I like it. I like it.

I mean, if you're if you're going to I I I think if if Aentic is going to do what a lot of us think it's going to do from a commerce perspective, you have to give consumers all the brands. We obviously want them all on Shopify, but there's some brands that want to participate now, but it may take some time for them to migrate over. So, this idea of opening up to anyone, we think is a big opportunity.

Very cool. Uh, walk me through the the the customer experience journey that might shift over this year. We were following the Aenta Commerce thing so closely that we were, you know, we were chat cheering for ads and chatbt back in, you know, June, uh, when they were kind of like, maybe we'll do it. Uh we were hoping that Black Friday would be the day that people were purchasing things in LLMs. Didn't quite happen yet. It's still in the experimental mode. I was using the uh shopping feature in ChachiPT to do shopping research.

We want we want fast takeoff.

But yeah, but I'm wondering like like the early adopters, is this going to be a more techy community that's buying their next TV in an LLM? Do you think it'll jump straight to the the the skims uh and the you know the TOAS category first? Like how do you see

Oh, look at you with all your direct to consumer brands. Way to go.

I got it.

Uh a couple things. I I think um I think it'll likely be something that like most people use some of the time and some people use most of the time. I don't think it's going to cross the threshold of most most the way e-commerce does now. Um I think

it's going to take some time. I do think though that you know this is these are all very very small numbers but if you look at the velocity I was asked um back as I was coming on stage uh today to do the keynote uh the uh the keynote after me was the CEO of PepsiCo and he said you know last year you talked about I asked you if if um uh if Aentic was overhyped and you said it's underhyped and I and he said well you know and I he said do you still believe it? I said, "Well, if you actually look January 2025, the last NRF to this NRF, we've actually seen a 14x increase in orders to Shopify stores coming from some sort of agent." Now, that doesn't mean the transaction

off the link

wherever it was. They may be going to the online store, but 14x is is dramatic. And again, it's on a very small base. We processed 90 billion, you know, last quarter. So, it's a small base still, but I think it's going to ramp up quickly. What I think is really cool is I think you're going to see companies that are going to actually have these drops. I think once you start seeing these excl like for example um last night I did an NRF event with Tom Sachs who is the designer behind the Marsard 3 shoes which I think is the coolest sneaker in the world. He runs Nike Craft.

Imagine he actually dropped something directly on one of the Agentic applications. Now you obviously have people that go there specifically for it. you now may decide, okay, that experience is pretty good. I'm now going to book my entire ski trip, uh, everything I need for my ski trip directly in the application. So once you have a good experience, I think the actual friction reduces. You'll keep having it over and over again. But the thing that we felt was missing and this is the reason why I think this UCP protocol is so important is it was very difficult to do merchandising inside of these applications and this protocol allows you to do a lot more of that. can say like back to cat and AG1 it's obvious that anyone who knows studies the company subscriptions play a huge role in the AG1 business model well you you know up until UCP happened you couldn't actually do subscriptions now you can or this idea of bundling you know for Gym Shark it's a huge part of their business is if you buy these you'll also buy these as well you can do that as well so I think all of these things are sort of in line with creating a much more delightful experience in the chat and and I think ultimately what it leads to is like this will be merit-based shopping which will be different than I think some of the traditional retailers who were kind of leaning on their balance sheets to spend money on ads. You can't really game the system in this in in that way. You actually have to be from a context perspective the right product for the right consumer.

How do you think uh creative assets will change or maybe stay the same? I've noticed that a lot of LLMs when you pull a link, it'll actually hydrate that link with an image of the product that you're looking at. Uh I imagine that a lot of people were previously thinking, well, everything's going to collapse down to text. I just need the facts and the data. Uh but now maybe the creative, the photography, the videos that actually just gets pulled into the chat apps that folks are using and it stays important. How are you thinking about that evolving? I think you're probably you're not going to I mean the idea of SEO won't exist in agentic because again it's merit based and it's mostly based on the context history you've had. But I do think though you're going to have these brands are going to have people at their companies who are thinking a lot about like consistent updates to UCP, consistent updates to the catalog. So they may pull something off the catalog and say we don't want to sell it anymore this way. Um, so I think there's going to be I don't know if they're going to be actual jobs, but there's going to be people inside of the company potentially in the in the merchandising department, um, who say actually the way that we want to sell this, the way we want to describe this to these agents is a particular way and then because of UCP and because of Shopify catalog, it gets easily disseminated across every single one of these agentic applications. So the experience just gets better and better. I think you have to be a little bit of a of a techno optimist. You guys obviously are are certainly there as I am to believe that even if the experience is not incredible right now, it's likely just going to get better at this ridiculous pace.

Yeah. Are the folks that you talk about uh the brands that you talk to, the leaders of those brands excited about um ads coming to uh chat surfaces? It feels like new unexplored territory. Whenever there's a new ad product, that's opportunity for fastmoving brands. But uh what are they worried about? What are they excited about? But what's the mood?

Most of the most of the excitement is actually around this idea of like is there a potential for this to level the playing field? Meaning, you know, if I've done a bunch of research historically on on the on aentic application,

yeah,

about James Purse or about, you know, Tom Sachs or about the stuff that I love, the brands that I love, and then I'm going on a hiking trip, it probably should not show me a generic pair of boots. it should probably show me on running because it knows to some extent that I actually favor direct to consumer brands or more modern retail brands as well. So the excitement actually is around like is this going to introduce more brands that otherwise are unknown to more people or you know uh True Classic T for example which you know if you're looking for a black t-shirt I suspect on a search engine you're not going to see True Classic T come up that much but it's an incredible product and and ultimately it can be found on these agentic tools in a way that it probably couldn't historically. That seems to be a lot of the excitement. The other excitement is e-commerce as a percentage of total retail is still sub 20%. You've heard that literally you hear that at the show all the time that people are like well you know we're inside the Shopify booth now and people that are more traditional say well where when's this going to eclipse 25%. There is a chance there is a school of thought that says that one of the things that Agentic might do is increase that penetration rate at a faster clip kind of alla you know co did because people that may not be big e-commerce consumers may be searching for recipes on chat GBT and through that process may end up actually starting to buy stuff there as well. So the other the other thing is like I think some of the time you go to a retail store you're going because you want to have a conversation about the product in a way that you just don't get with a website. A website is like a beautiful catalog and if you go around in the right order and you look at the FAQ and maybe you talk with support and all the and hopefully they respond quickly and actually give you the insight like then you can get to the purchase decision. But so a lot of people will just be like I'll just drive by the store and get it. But I feel like LLMs can provide that uh they can give people understanding on a subject or a category or a specific product that allow that gives them the confidence to make a purchase, right? And so

actually I'll go one step further. I think it's actually a better version of that because it's an unbiased discussion, an unbiased conversation. I mean the bias is based on your context history and based on merit as opposed to being based on, you know, what spiff is that particular salesperson getting today in a commission structure. So yeah, it does. I mean, you know, it's so cheesy of course, but like when I describe it to like my mother where this is going, I explain that this may very well be the greatest personal shopper in the history of retail who knows everything about you, knows your sizes, know in certain, you know, in in European fashion, you that's this size, but Americans, it's like that knows where you're located, knows where you travel to, and can provide this unbiased objective recommendation. Uh and then once you build in these applica you build in checkout which we're doing with with our Aentic um storefronts right into the chat it becomes this really delightful experience.

Yeah.

Well congrat uh yeah the most uh transformative year for the way online commerce happens.

How can we how can we follow the numbers here? I can keep I can I can keep coming and telling you the numbers. I will tell you that I did say on stage of 5,000 people about an hour ago that I do think like this is the gold this is a golden age uh of retail and and I think you're going to see brands there are brands right now that none of us have heard of that in 6 months from now we be like I can't believe we didn't know that brand existed and I think that type of velocity you know there there's going to be so many more of these skims and Gym Sharks and Alo Yoga and Vioris and Tovis and AG1s and favorite like you know we know these brands because we kind of live in this world it's what we're interested in um but for the most part most readily through the evolution and we shop wants to power the whole thing.

Yeah. It's going to be so fascinating following this ramp relative to mobile in previous booms or or

That's right. Or or actually social commerce be another one because there was some there was uncertainty around it and then ultimately actually social is a wonderful

there were a lot of experiments where oh you'll be able to shop under YouTube videos or under Facebook marketplace concurrently as well. It turned out it was a great place.

Yeah. Exactly.

That's right. It was a great place for discovery, but the transaction still took on the online store. This is different because a transaction happens embedded.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be fascinating to follow. I think I think we're in for a fast takeoff. It's going to be a good year.

Uh a great time to be in business and a great time to be at Shopify. So, congratulations on all the success.

Thank you very much. You guys are impressed. Thank you for having me on. I like broadcast from wherever.

Fantastic.

Amazing. Going to be a massive year.

Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.

Goodbye. Uh, and you know their other partner, we got to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. Google is powering all of that. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. Gemini 3 Pro. State-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. You can build there.

We talked about this last week. California state reservoir levels are now at 130% of normal, holding 7 trillion gallons of water. It's remarkable. Ally Bell says, "God wants us to feed Claude in every model, every data center. There's plenty of water to go around."

And Ashley had the same idea. Ashley Van says, "God is rewarding us for building AI. All the water, all the water people are super happy." Uh Tyler, you have some breaking news.

Uh yeah. So, okay. So, earlier on the show, um I was reading into the Jack Clark blog. I was like, "Oh, maybe Jack Clark is is pointing to something that data anthropics can build space data centers." I posted that. He responded,

put me in the truth zone. He said, "No, you should not be reading into this or any anthropic grand strategy." And he um he totally ratioed me.

Oh wow. He got destroyed.

But wow.

Brutal mogging.

Brutal mogging.

Oh wow.

So no. Yeah. No anthropic data centers in space.

Well, I mean you It's funny. I was we were talking to Andrew from Cerebrus and uh I was kind of giving him the layup. like I'd heard from other people that uh like that that Cerus would be a unique beneficiary of space data centers if it happens and he was like nah it's not really [laughter] on my road map in the next 35 years. Um but we we will see you know everything could be pulled forward if there's you know new uh new new advances there space uh you know payload to orbit comes way down there's a bunch of ways that that could be exciting but

raised additional capital at a $1.6 6 billion valuation their series C2. This was wonderful team. Love to see it. They got Tro Price Alimter D1

Stepstone.

We got to get

1789 Founders Fund Lux Capital A16Z 137

Delian Company.

All

the absolute uh boys.

Yeah. Back in.

What a run from Chris Power.

Uh what else we got? Uh this post here from horse hater.

Horse hater

went very viral yesterday. I didn't uh I didn't like this post. The whole post is horses. Don't like them.

Boom. We love horses here.

Horse hater was asked why. And horse hater replies they are evil creatures. I don't know that there I I know that there is only malice in their hearts.

Completely false.

Fake news.

Just exposing yourself. We should community note this.

I I'm going to write a community note right now. I'm going to get kicked out of the program if I do this.

Horse hater hates horses. Huge surprise. Alexis

says uh is sharing an article. Luxury watch prices hit a two-year high in the secondary market. Partially due to and maybe almost fully due to tariffs.

Oh yeah. Tariffs were big part of the story.

So if you like spending more money on watches,

the show is probably doing a lot. If you like spending more money on watches, you'll love tariffs.

Yes.

Um, but Alexa says, "A great anti- AI bet I've been making is in human craftsmanship. Human excellence. Collectibles will keep thriving." So, if you needed if you if you needed a reason to buy another watch, this is it.

This is it. But it's interesting because he say he frames it as an anti- aai bet. It's sort of an anti-AII bet in that it's not a beneficiary of AI, but it's still it's it's a very AGI pill bet in the sense that in in a moment when AGI AI is accelerating, maybe humans craftsmanship is more valuable than ever and that the it's sort of an anti-slop, but it's it's it's still aligned with a with a bullish view on AI broadly. So, he's not saying I'm I'm not I I don't think AI is going to work, so I'm buying watches. He's saying AI will work and so I'm buying watches which I think

yeah I mean humanoids are going to have to be stunting.

They will they will need some something on the wrist of your humanoid and why not an FPJ or a PC Philippe.

Yeah. So, so it's interesting. Uh, uh, watches, Evelyn goods, right, more desirable as they get more expensive. That means that if a robot can make a Swiss watch, like right now Rolex might cost $2,000 to make, right? Some parts are

automated, some is uh, you know, handcrafted, and suddenly Rolex can uh, make the watch for, you know, 50 bucks just due to automation. It does. They don't automatic. They're not automatically going to say like, "Okay, let's bring the prices down, right?" Because the price is part of the product. So, I do think it's a I do think

there is a little bit of a potential scoop here. Bobby Good Latte uh replies to Alexis O'hane here and says, "Yep, I love that both Zuck, we all knew Zuck is into watches and Sam Alman are both into watches. Shows that they still value handcrafted objects. I didn't know that Sam Alman was into watches. It makes sense. He's into cars. We know that. But He likes he likes to double. Does he do like a Jacob and Co on each? [laughter]

I haven't. I know. I I truthfully I've not seen a photo of Sam with a hitter on the wrist. I've seen him in the Koig. I've seen him in the McLaren F1. Uh I know that there's a car collection there, but I haven't seen anything hit the timeline of a wrist check, but maybe 2026 is the year of the Sam Alman risk check. Uh I'm sure his PR team would love that going out on the internet. Uh, but I would support it and I will fight for you. I will be your strongest soldier, Sam, if you want to drop uh a little little photo on the Instagram of the of whatever's on your wrist. Anyway, fantastic show.

Great show, folks. Great show, folks. Uh, thank you for hanging out with us today.

Well, there's one last scoop that we should that we should talk about is uh from Kylie Robinson over at uh Core Memory with Ashley Vance. She got another scoop.

Uh, no, this was just from the weekend. We didn't talk about this, but uh XAI staff has been using Anthropic's models internally through Cursor until Anthropic cut off the startup's access. This week, everyone's using uh Anthropic apparently. So, uh this went viral, got 7,000 likes. Uh and uh

yeah, I think at this point, if you are a lab and you haven't had your access to anthropic cut off, polish up your resume [laughter]

because clearly they're just going to do this to any company that that is a meaningful threat.

Yeah. There's another dynamic where you can be using the model because you think it's good, but you can also be trying to distill the model because if there's good data that can be pulled out, you you might just say, "Okay, we want this capability that's uniquely available at this model endpoint. So, let's grab that." There's a whole bunch of reasons why this could be happening, but it is dramatic. Tyler,

yeah, I was just going to say that was like the original deep deepsee controversy people thought they were distilling from uh CHBT.

Yeah, GBT.

Uh before we go, I got to give a shout out to Cooper in the chat. Every single day when the market closes, he comes in and he says, "Time to like the stream."

I love it. Thank you so much.

It's a movement. It's a movement.

Thank you everyone for watching. Thank you for leaving us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter, tvpn.com. We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

Just one more sleep.

Goodbye.