Shopify’s head of engineering calls token leaderboards a mistake

Anthropic has joined Frontier, the carbon removal collective founded by Stripe, Google, and Shopify, becoming the first pure-play AI company to participate in the group. The move is part of a new $915 million funding tranche that nearly doubles Frontier’s total pledges to $1.8 billion. The announcement marks Anthropic’s first climate-related commitment, arriving at a […]

Spellbook, the contract AI pioneer for the LLM generation, has hired Jean-Michel Lemieux, who has quite an amazing CV. Past roles include CTO of Shopify ...

A good time with old maps. | Image: Past Maps Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website. Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He's a former engineer at Meta and an experienced tech founder who in 2022 sold his last venture - an e-commerce tool for businesses that use Shopify - right as the AI boom was booming. "I had my prior VC investors breathing down my neck, going 'start something else. We'll write you a blank check.'" He had other ideas. People generally aren't rushing to get into the website business, what with the Google Zero event horizon approaching. Campbell was undeterred and has gro … Read the full story at The Verge.

Insider Brief PRESS RELEASE — Text, the company behind LiveChat, ChatBot and HelpDesk, is revealing details of its strategic shift aimed at turning customer service into a profit engine with the help of new features powered by AI Agents. Text announces the release of Shopify-native AI selling agents, designed to move customer service teams beyond answering questions to actively […]

Ian Crosby, the founder ousted from collapsed accounting startup Bench, has raised $10 million in seed funding for a new venture called Synthetic, which aims to build a fully autonomous AI bookkeeper capable of generating accrual-based financials without human involvement. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Basis Set Ventures and Shopify […]

RingCentral has expanded its AI Receptionist product with new links to Shopify, Calendly and WhatsApp, as the communications software company tries to push the product beyond basic call answering and into more routine customer service tasks. The company said AI Receptionist, known as AIR, can now handle some order enquiries through Shopify, arrange appointments through […] The post RingCentral adds Shopify, Calendly, and WhatsApp to AI Receptionist appeared first on AI News.

Agentic AI has emerged as the software industry’s latest shiny thing. Beyond smarter chatbots, AI agents operate with increasing autonomy, making them poised to drive efficiency gains across enterprises. “Agentic refers to AI systems that can take actions on behalf of users, not just generate text or answer questions,” says Andrew McNamara, director of applied machine learning at Shopify. Agentic systems run continuously until a task is complete, he adds, citing Shopify’s Sidekick, a proactive agent for merchants. Development of agentic AI now spans many business domains. According to Anthropic, a provider of large language models (LLMs), AI agents are most commonly deployed in software engineering, accounting for roughly half of use cases, followed by back-office automation, marketing, sales, finance, and data analysis. “A concrete example is in IT incident resolution,” says Heath Ramsey, group VP of AI platform outbound product management at ServiceNow. In this context, AI agents sur