Shopify Sidekick Spring: Every New Feature and How to Use Them

Shopify Sidekick is no longer a sidebar chat box. With the Spring '26 Edition, published June 17, 2026, Shopify embedded Sidekick across every screen of the admin, opened it to third-party apps, and shipped a cluster of new capabilities that make it the closest thing to a free junior employee a merchant has ever had. If you want to know what actually shipped, what is still in early access, and which features deserve your attention first, this is the post.

Key takeaways

• Sidekick now runs on every screen of the Shopify app, including by voice and on Apple Watch, with no full-screen takeover.
• App Extensions let Sidekick reach into partner apps (Klaviyo, Loop, Smile, Judge.me, and 11+ more) so you get answers and take action without leaving the chat.
• Sidekick Pulse proactively surfaces next-best-action recommendations on the redesigned Admin home, pulling from your store data and market trends.
• Custom app generation is live but plan-gated: Grow, Advanced, and Shopify Plus only as of April 2026.
• Campaign Autopilot shipped in early access. The AI sales associate in Shopify Inbox is generally available.

What the Spring '26 Edition actually is

Shopify publishes two platform editions per year. The Spring '26 Edition is a single release, not a staggered rollout. It launched on June 17, 2026 with more than 150 updates spanning selling, shopping, and building. Sidekick and admin-side AI are the centrepiece, but the release also includes Campaign Autopilot, the AI sales associate in Shopify Inbox, native A/B testing through Rollouts, and new analytics chart types.

This edition follows the Winter '26 Edition (December 10, 2025), which introduced the first wave of Sidekick upgrades and the Agentic Storefronts infrastructure. Spring '26 builds on that foundation and opens most of it to every merchant, not just beta participants.

Sidekick is now everywhere in the admin

The structural change is straightforward: Sidekick is no longer a feature you open. It is a layer you work within. It is accessible on every screen of the Shopify app by typing or voice, without a full-screen takeover that pulls you out of context. You can keep editing a product page, ask Sidekick a question, get the answer in the same window, and carry on.

Three additions make this more than a cosmetic change:

Background processing. Sidekick keeps working after you move on to another task, run multiple chats, or close the window. You no longer have to wait in the chat for results.

Apple Watch queries. Merchants can ask Sidekick business questions from an Apple Watch for quick lookups, moving routine checks off the desk entirely.

Clarifying multiple-choice questions. Instead of returning a vague or wrong result when the prompt is ambiguous, Sidekick now asks follow-up questions with multiple-choice answers. That single change removes a lot of the frustration that made AI assistants feel unreliable.

According to Shopify's Q1 2026 earnings, weekly active shops using Sidekick were up 385% year over year, and merchants built more than 12,000 custom apps through it in that single quarter.

Sidekick App Extensions: finally breaking out of Shopify's own screens

This is the most significant structural upgrade in the Spring '26 Edition for anyone who runs their business across multiple tools. Sidekick App Extensions let third-party apps surface their data and actions directly inside Sidekick conversations.

There are two extension types:

• Data Extensions let Sidekick pull partner-app data into a conversation. Ask "what is my best-performing email subject line this month?" and Klaviyo's extension can answer that from within Sidekick, without switching tabs.
• Action Extensions let Sidekick route you to the right spot inside an app and stage a change for your confirmation, so you act without leaving the conversation.

The program launched with 15+ partners, including Klaviyo, Loop, Smile, Judge.me, Matrixify, Seguno, Yotpo, and Checkout Links. Importantly, building an App Extension is open to any developer in the Shopify ecosystem. This is not a closed or invite-only program, which means the partner list will grow quickly.

If you use any of the launch partners, enable the relevant extension now. It is the fastest way to reduce the context-switching cost of running your store.

Sidekick Pulse: proactive insights on the redesigned Admin home

Sidekick Pulse converts your store's sales, traffic, and inventory data into next-best-action recommendations, displayed on a redesigned Admin home that puts Sidekick at the centre. You open the admin and Sidekick has already done the overnight analysis, surfacing things like a product with rising returns, a segment worth re-engaging, or an inventory threshold you are approaching.

Pulse runs in the background and uses both your store data and broader market trend signals. It requires Shopify Network Intelligence to be enabled, and availability is not universal yet, so check your admin home to see if it has rolled out to your store.

Custom app generation: what it actually does

Custom app generation was introduced in the Winter '26 Edition and is now more capable. You describe what you need in plain English and Sidekick builds a working Shopify app. Shopify's own edition notes list real examples:

• "Create an app that recommends which products I need to reorder."
• "Create a task tracker for my whole team."
• "Create an app that checks returns and cancellation eligibility for orders."
• "Create a bulk B2B company importer that uploads companies from a CSV file."

These are not mockups or templates. Sidekick writes and deploys a functional app, with an in-built editor for code, mobile and desktop preview, and version history. The app runs serverlessly: Shopify handles hosting, App Bridge and Polaris are auto-injected, and authentication is handled by direct API access.

One critical caveat: custom app generation is plan-gated as of April 2026. You need Grow, Advanced, or Shopify Plus. Basic plan merchants had a grace period that ended in April 2026.

Flow automation: Sidekick now builds nearly half of all flows

According to Shopify's Q1 2026 earnings, nearly 50% of all Shopify Flows generated in Q1 were built with Sidekick. That number tells you this is a production feature, not a novelty.

The workflow is simple: describe the automation in plain language and Sidekick builds the YAML. A prompt like "When inventory for any product drops below 10 units, send me a Slack alert and tag the product low-stock" becomes a deployable flow that you review and activate. If you want to verify the logic before going live, Sidekick can now generate test events for your Flow automations directly.

For anyone who has spent 45 minutes clicking through the Flow builder for a conditional trigger, this is a genuine time saving. See the Shopify app and automation strategies guide for more on how to stack flows with other growth tactics.

Campaign Autopilot and the AI sales associate

Campaign Autopilot (early access at launch) is an AI-managed marketing tool that runs campaigns from a single console with real-time optimization within merchant-set guardrails. It extends promotions across multiple channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and Google. It is in early access, which means you can request access but should not build a core marketing dependency on it yet. More channels are listed as coming soon.

The AI sales associate in Shopify Inbox is generally available. It answers buyer questions, suggests products, and handles order inquiries using the catalog, inventory, and policy data already in your admin. Merchants control the tone the associate uses and decide when it escalates to a human. This is the closest Sidekick infrastructure has come to a customer-facing capability, though technically this feature lives in Shopify Inbox rather than the merchant-side Sidekick agent.

Early merchant results are significant. Omnilux reported that AI channels drove 3.2% of total revenue in March 2026. Cozy Earth reported overall revenue from AI channels up 20x year over year. Both figures are merchant-reported and cited by Shopify, not independently audited, so treat them as directional rather than as a forecast for your store.

Saved Skills and ShopifyQL queries

Two smaller features that compound over time:

Saved Skills give you up to 25 reusable prompts per account. Type "/" followed by the skill name to fire them off. They are shareable via URL with your team, which means you can standardize how your staff uses Sidekick across common tasks like weekly performance summaries, low-inventory checks, or discount code creation.

ShopifyQL expansion. Sidekick can now write ShopifyQL queries for web performance and payments data, and has expanded its ability to write fulfillments and payouts queries. If you have been manually pulling these reports, this alone is worth testing this week.

What Sidekick still cannot do

Being clear about limits is as important as covering the wins.

• It stays inside Shopify. Sidekick cannot reach your external CRM, ad platform dashboards, or email tools directly, unless those tools have built a Sidekick App Extension.
• It is not fully customer-facing. The AI sales associate in Inbox is a separate surface. Sidekick itself talks to you, not your shoppers.
• It diagnoses but does not fully redesign. Sidekick can tell you a product page has a 0% add-to-cart rate and flag what to fix. It cannot rebuild that page's layout or CRO structure for you. For that, you need a developer or a proper Shopify theme developer.
• Accuracy still needs a review step. Some merchants report imprecise answers on complex tasks. The approve-before-save model exists for good reason. Treat Sidekick output as a fast first draft, not a final answer.

Practical action checklist

Here is what to do this week, ordered by impact:

1. Check your Admin home for Sidekick Pulse. If it is live on your store, spend 10 minutes reading its recommendations before acting on anything else.
2. Enable App Extensions for every launch partner you use. Klaviyo, Loop, Smile, and Judge.me are the highest-leverage starting points.
3. Set up 5 Saved Skills for recurring tasks (weekly report, low-stock check, discount code creation, customer segment review, campaign brief).
4. Test the AI sales associate in Shopify Inbox. Configure tone, set escalation rules, and run it for two weeks against real customer conversations.
5. Try one Flow automation built by Sidekick. Start with a low-stakes trigger so you can audit the YAML before activating anything business-critical.
6. If you are on Grow, Advanced, or Plus: describe one internal tool you wish you had and let Sidekick generate the app. The reorder recommendation app is a practical first build.

If you want deeper support getting these configured correctly, the Shopify developer services page covers how to work with a specialist on the implementation side.