Micro Utility With Gen AI: Shopify's Miqdad Jaffer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Do you believe in the power of data to change the world? Hi, I'm Satyen Sangani, CEO of Alation and host of the podcast Data Radicals. On Data Radicals, I interview the visionaries and the practitioners who put the theory of what's possible with data into practice.
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**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:54)
Thank How can generative AI tools help grow businesses while keeping users in control? Find out on today's episode.

**Miqdad Jaffer** (1:07)
I'm Miqdad Jaffer from Shopify, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:12)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, professor of analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and business strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:30)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT Smr and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:56)
Hi, everyone. Today, Shervin and I are pleased to be joined by Miqdad Jaffer, director of product at Shopify. Miqdad, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Let's get started.

**Miqdad Jaffer** (2:05)
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here and excited to talk a little bit about AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:10)
Great.
We all use Shopify, but we may not know it. Can you give us a brief overview of Shopify and tell us what a director of product actually does?

**Miqdad Jaffer** (2:20)
Sure. So Shopify is a platform for entrepreneurs to be able to set up their storefronts online. You may have seen Shopify whenever you're going to purchase an item from a retailer. You may have gone to the checkout and seen that purple shop pay button.
And for many of us, that's probably where you've been exposed to Shopify. It's a way for an entrepreneur to be able to set up their storefront on the internet and for a way as you as a buyer to be able to transact in the fastest, simplest way possible, to be able to make sure that the item arrives at your door.
In other cases, you may have seen Shopify on a platform like shop.ai where you might have searched for a specific event that you're putting together, a specific product that you're looking for, and tried to filter it all down across the many merchants on Shopify. A merchant would go into Shopify and log in. There is a product section on the left as an example. They would go into the product section. They would click add a new product. And then within add a new product, there is space for a title, a description, and some other fields. In terms of my role, my responsibilities are how do I think about AI and how can it fit into that realm of entrepreneurship and what can we do to accelerate our merchants' success and progress as they build up their storefronts, sell their products, and grow as entrepreneurs.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:44)
So how does that involve artificial intelligence? I heard a lot of e-commerce. I hear a lot of connecting, but how does that involve artificial intelligence?

**Miqdad Jaffer** (3:51)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think that when people are looking to start as an entrepreneur, there's a lot to it. So there are considerations of what's the right product, what's the right price, what's the right placement, what's the right promotion, how do I set up everything with my storefront, how do I maintain what good looks like as I grow and as I advance. What we've seen is that AI is an opportunity to make entrepreneurship accessible for everyone. With every business unit, we want to utilize AI to create more efficiency from managing administrative tasks to supporting business operations.
Administrative tasks can be as simple as creating a new product description, figuring out what the right subject line for an email could be. And then the business operations side of it could be just about everything from understanding the business, figuring out the analytics of it, what questions should I ask, what's the strategy that I should employ, and review AI as a powerful assistant that can weave itself in and out of that process.