Platform & products

Launch drift

Definition

The gradual mismatch between an agent's configuration and reality that sets in when nobody actively tunes it after go-live — catalog changes go unreflected, new question patterns go unanswered, and the agent that was accurate on day one becomes gradually less accurate with each week of neglect.

Defined in The First 30 Days After Your Agent Goes Live.

Related terms

Shopify Knowledge Base: The Shopify-built admin app where you review generated FAQs, read buyer inquiries, and publish custom FAQs that AI shopping agents use when they answer policy, service, and brand questions.
Agentic commerce: Commerce transactions initiated, researched, or completed with an AI agent acting on the shopper's behalf, rather than a human clicking through a storefront unassisted.
Conversation flow: A named pattern of shopper intent — e.g. 'compare two products on a specific attribute' — paired with the reasoning logic and catalog data the Brand Agent needs to answer any phrasing of that intent well, not a single scripted exchange.
Confidence threshold: The internal setting that decides whether a Brand Agent answers directly or escalates to a human. Set too low, it guesses too often; set too high, it escalates so much the feature stops saving anyone time.
Prose-trapped fact: A true, useful product fact that exists only inside a marketing description rather than as a structured field — readable by a shopper, invisible to an agent's filtering logic.
Brand Agent: Shopify's merchant-controlled AI shopping assistant, shipped in the Spring '26 edition on June 17, 2026, currently available to Shopify Plus merchants only.

All 112 terms

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