What: An interview of Shopify’s Head of Data Science to understand how Shopify puts itself at the service of merchants.

Why it is important: Such an approach allowed Shopify to compete with Amazon in terms of GMV in the course of very few years.

Forbes interviews the Head of Data Science, Engineering, Revenue and Growth at Shopify to understand how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are used to enhance both product offerings and customer experience, for the 1.7m merchants it powers.

Shopify aims at empowering entrepreneurs and retailers by giving them a simple and efficient experience: personalized onboarding, intelligent tech support, advanced analytics to detect in 30 seconds the most important points of attention. Machine learning is also used to categorize products en masse.

This is achieved thanks to a vision that has helped Shopify since the beginning, i.e. putting themselves in the shoes of merchants instead of building a new technical solutions. It is all about simplifying tech to put tech as a tool at the service of someone who does not know anything about it (and should not).

Data Driven Decisions And Forecasting At Shopify