The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition that Shopify's chief technical officer Mikhail Parakhin is departing the e-commerce giant after two years. The Globe's Irene Galea writes that 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. 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 on-line 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 Tuesday morning. The company did not say when Mr. Parakhin is leaving or provide a reason for his exit. Earlier this year, the company partnered with Google and Microsoft to allow customers to buy Shopify items through its Gemini and Copilot apps. In September, the company announced a new partnership to integrate Meta's AI chatbot, Muse, into Shopify's on-line shopping and automated checkout technology.