Shopify chief technology officer Mikhail Parakhin leaves after two years

Shopify Inc.’s SHOP-T chief technical officer Mikhail Parakhin is departing the e-commerce giant after two years.

Mr. Parakhin joined Shopify in 2024 to oversee the company’s engineering and data organizations, and to “push Shopify to the cutting edge” in machine learning and artificial intelligence adoption, the Ottawa-based company said in a release when he first joined.

Since then, Shopify has embraced agentic AI to help its merchants sell products to customers via chatbot, a step which industry analysts have said has the potential to reshape the future of online shopping and advertising. Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can make decisions and use external tools with limited human supervision or instruction.

Shopify confirmed Mr. Parakhin’s departure in a statement Tuesday morning. The company did not say when Mr. Parakhin is leaving or provide a reason for his exit.

“Mikhail has left an indelible mark on the company and has helped us level up in engineering and machine learning. As he leaves, we’re grateful for his contributions and glad that he’ll continue as an adviser,” Shopify spokesperson Rebecca Feigelsohn said in an e-mail.

Mr. Parakhin could not immediately be reached for comment. His departure was first reported by BetaKit.

Shopify shares soar as AI efforts begin to pay off

Earlier this year, the company partnered with Google and Microsoft Corp. MSFT-Q to allow customers to buy Shopify items through its Gemini and Copilot apps, and launched a new customer plan to allow brands with online stores hosted on other e-commerce platforms to use its infrastructure without needing to have a Shopify online store.

In September, the company announced a new partnership to integrate Meta’s META-Q AI chatbot, Muse, into Shopify’s online shopping and automated checkout technology.

With Google, Shopify also co-developed a new open standard – in computer science, a standard set of rules that determine how data are moved – called the Universal Commerce Protocol, which allows AI agents to complete checkout on a customer’s behalf.

“We have both expertise and visibility from behind the scenes of what’s happening and ability to partner with the largest companies like OpenAI and Google,” Mr. Parakhin said in a statement at the time.

Mr. Parakhin was named a 2026 Time Executive of the Year. “A trained physicist turned machine-learning engineer, Mr. Parakhin spends time every weekend in his home ‘cave’ doing hands-on AI work,” the magazine said.

Mr. Parakhin previously spent more than 10 years at Microsoft over two periods, building consumer and enterprise-facing products like Copilot, finally serving as chief executive officer of advertising and web services at Microsoft.

Between two periods at Microsoft, he was chief technology officer of Moscow-based tech and search engine company Yandex LLC, where he developed multiple search engines, cloud services and digital assistants.