Why Amazon Wants To Block Perplexity (And What It Means for E-Commerce)

The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO

Shopify reported this week that AI-driven traffic to their stores is up 7x since January. Orders from AI-powered search are up 11x.

The base is small, obviously. But this isn’t another Adobe forecast deck about what might happen in 2027—this is looking back at actual numbers that already happened. We’ve been hearing projections for months. It’s good to see something real.

President Harley Finkelstein called it “the biggest shift in technology since the internet.” He’s excited for a reason: e-commerce has been mostly stagnant in the last decade, at least in the west (China is a different universe altogether). Now AI is here, and consumers want AI—64% of shoppers say they’re likely to use it for purchases. Shopify has partnerships with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. Things are moving.