This talk focuses on our vision for a Commerce Foundation Model, a model that can unify and understand all the different aspects of the commerce journey, from merchants to buyers, and everyone in between. We’ll share our motivation, discuss analogies to foundational models in other modalities (text, vision), and get the audience excited about the wide-ranging impacts and challenges of such a model. Then we’ll go deep on the attributes of the kinds of models/architectures we might consider, and the special/new challenges posed by a modality of this nature. Next we’ll pick one or two architectures to explore in greater depth (eg, HSTU, Tiger, etc), and discuss the pros/cons of different approaches. Finally, we’ll link this theoretical discussion back to the work we’ve been doing at Shopify – or as much of it as we can ;). Think stuff like unifying our logging to get consistent deep and wide event streams, applications we’ve applied it to, and results we’ve achieved so far. The audience will leave excited to learn more about how Shopify is laying the “foundation” to make commerce better for everyone.