First, there was vibe coding. Now, get ready for "vibe entrepreneurship." Andrew McNamara, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Shopify, joins us to explain how his team is making this new era of business a reality. He shares the vision behind Shopify Sidekick, an AI co-founder designed to empower merchants by acting as their on-demand e-commerce expert. Drawing on his 16-year journey building AI assistants, Andrew reveals what it truly takes to create an AI tool that customers can trust with their livelihood. He shares a critical insight from his applied research background: the hardest and most important part of building production-ready AI isn't the model, but the evaluation ("eval") system. Andrew breaks down Shopify's innovative approach of using an LLM-as-a-judge to measure how well they're fulfilling user goals, not just executing features. This conversation is a definitive guide to creating high-trust AI systems and offers a powerful glimpse into the future of commerce. Check out: Register now: Closing the AI gap: Exceeding executive expectations for AI productivity Follow the hosts: Follow Ben Follow Andrew Follow today's guest(s): Follow Andrew on X Follow Andrew on LinkedIn Andrew's Talk at ICML Learn more about Shopify Sidekick Follow Fatima on LinkedIn Referenced in today's show: The Economics of Software Innovation “AI First” and the Bus Factor of 0 GitLab 18.3 released with Duo Agent Platform in Visual Studio (Beta) and Embedded views OFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.
