If you have opened the Shopify admin lately, you have met Sidekick: the AI assistant that answers questions about your store in plain English. Until recently, Sidekick could only see core Shopify data. Orders, products, customers. Useful, but blind to everything that lives inside the apps you actually run your business on.
That changed with Sidekick app extensions, which Shopify released in June and is showcasing at DotDev 2026 in Toronto this week, with dedicated sessions on how Sidekick changes the way merchants engage with apps. The short version: apps can now securely expose their own data to Sidekick, so when you ask a question, the answer can draw on your wholesale pricing, your loyalty program, your rental calendar, not just your order list.
What you can ask, app by app
These are not hypotheticals. Every question below is answered by a live tool we have tested end to end in the Shopify admin.
Miko B2B Wholesale House
Ask "which wholesale accounts are going quiet?" and Sidekick surfaces accounts whose ordering rhythm has slowed, from your real order history. Ask "what does the Dealer group pay for this product?", "do I have pending wholesale applications?", or "are any wholesale orders being charged retail prices?", which is a check no other B2B app exposes. Eleven tools cover pricing, volume breaks, net terms, product visibility, purchase orders, and your plan usage.
Miko Loyalty and Rewards
Ask "who are my top loyalty members?", "how many members are close to a reward?", or "what is my program doing this month?". Eight tools answer from your live member base, tiers, and earn rules. You can also tell Sidekick to open your program setup to make a change, and you confirm it in the app.
Miko Claude AI
Ask "which customers are at risk of churning?" or "who are my highest value customers?" and Sidekick reads the pre-computed intelligence Miko Claude AI maintains: RFM segments, churn scores, and lifetime value. From there, one instruction sets up a win-back email or a re-engagement campaign inside the app.
Miko AI Descriptions and Narrate
Ask "how much of my catalog has AI content?" or "how many products have audio narration?" and you get counts from your actual coverage, plus your remaining generation quota. When the honest answer is that the app needs to compute something first, Sidekick says so and points you into the app instead of guessing.
Miko Product Rentals
Ask "do I have overdue rentals?", "what bookings are coming up this week?", or "is this product available on these dates?". Seven tools read your live booking calendar, deposits, and rental revenue.
Why this matters more than it sounds
The obvious win is speed. The question you would have answered by opening an app, finding the right screen, and scanning a table is now a sentence in the admin.
The less obvious win is that your apps stop being silos. Sidekick can combine signals: churn scores from Miko Claude AI sitting next to quiet wholesale accounts from B2B Wholesale House is a picture of at-risk revenue you previously had to assemble by hand.
There is also a trust point worth being explicit about. The question-answering tools are strictly read-only. Where a Miko app offers an action through Sidekick, such as editing your loyalty program, the assistant navigates you into the app and you confirm the change yourself on the app's own screen. Nothing writes to your store behind your back.
Why we built this early
Shopify caps Sidekick at twenty integrated apps per store, and its answers route to whichever app describes the merchant's question best. We took that seriously: we shipped extensions for the entire Miko suite, tested every tool against production data, and wrote the tool descriptions so Sidekick knows exactly when a question belongs to a Miko app. It is the same thesis the whole Miko suite is built on. Native beats bolted-on, and being early on Shopify's own surfaces compounds.
If you already run a Miko app, there is nothing to enable. Update to the latest version if your store has not rolled onto it yet, open Sidekick, and ask. The first time Sidekick uses an app's data it will ask for your consent, once.
Common questions
Do I need a specific Shopify plan for Sidekick?
Sidekick is part of the Shopify admin. The Miko Sidekick tools work wherever Sidekick is available, on every Miko plan including the free tiers.
Does it cost anything extra?
No. The Sidekick extension ships inside each Miko app. Install the app and the tools are there.
Can Sidekick see my customer data through Miko apps?
Only what you approve. Shopify shows a consent prompt before Sidekick first reads an app's data, and the Miko tools return the minimum needed to answer: group names, counts, order rhythms, member stats. The B2B app does not expose customer name or email search at all.
What if Sidekick cannot answer a question?
We instructed every Miko extension to say when something is out of scope and point you to the right screen in the app, rather than invent an answer. An assistant that guesses with your business data is worse than no assistant.
Try it on your store
Install any Miko app and ask Sidekick a question about your own data. Start with the one closest to your bottleneck: B2B Wholesale House, Loyalty and Rewards, Claude AI, AI Descriptions and Narrate, or Product Rentals. Questions? Talk to the team.
