The e-commerce landscape, once dominated by large brands and search engine visibility, is being transformed by artificial intelligence. Shopify's Chief Operating Officer, Jess Hertz, discusses how AI is revolutionizing product discovery and purchasing. Shopify is building the essential infrastructure to enable AI-powered commerce, making products discoverable and purchasable by AI agents. This initiative is contributing to Shopify's significant growth, with nearly 90% of revenue coming from long-term merchants.Hertz highlights the impact of Shopify's AI-powered commerce agent, Sidekick, and its Catalog product layer. Catalog data doubles conversion rates when used by AI agents compared to scraped data. Shopify's complexity serves as a competitive advantage, differentiating it from large AI platforms that might try to build their own commerce layers. Shopify aims to empower merchants by providing a unified operating system for commerce across various channels.Regarding AI costs, Shopify's engineers have flexibility with AI tokens, and the company sees a healthy return on investment. Despite flat headcount for over eight quarters, revenue continues to grow significantly. Hertz also introduces the concept of the "X-shaped" employee, who possesses multiple spikes of expertise, enabling them to absorb complexity and move efficiently across domains. This shift from "T-shaped" to "X-shaped" individuals, when combined effectively in teams, is seen as the key to unlocking unprecedented productivity in the AI era.