NVIDIA details Shopify's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning post-training for Sidekick
NVIDIA published a blog post describing European retailers using open models and physical AI across commerce and fulfillment, led by Shopify's work on its Sidekick merchant assistant. According to the post, Shopify post-trained NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning for a GraphQL subagent inside Sidekick, using the NVIDIA Megatron Bridge library for fine-tuning and NVIDIA NeMo RL for reinforcement learning, with the subagent retrieving store data for features such as Sidekick Pulse. NVIDIA says that on Shopify's internal benchmark the post-trained model surpassed a leading frontier model in accuracy while cutting serving costs by 90% and responding 7x faster, and that NVIDIA CCluster vLLM optimization delivered 4.5x faster performance and up to 12x lower inference cost across five other use cases. The post also cites Zooplus rebuilding product discovery with the Nemotron Retriever library to reach 86% search accuracy in a prototype, plus Photoroom, Omi with L'Oréal, Otto Group and Mirakl deployments.
NVIDIA is using named production deployments, such as Shopify's Sidekick subagent, to argue that post-trained open models can reach frontier-level accuracy at far lower serving cost, though the figures cited come from an internal, vendor-reported benchmark.
European retailers are using open models and physical intelligence across use cases — from a commerce platform cutting inference costs by 90% to to a fulfillment center where collaboration of different robotic fleets is simulated inside a digital twin.
Frontier Results With Open Models
Retail leaders and technology companies across Europe are using NVIDIA-accelerated open and frontier models to advance agentic commerce, digital product discovery and retail R&D.
Shopify post-trains open models to reach frontier-level accuracy at a fraction of the cost. Its engineers use the NVIDIA Megatron Bridge library for faster fine-tuning and NVIDIA NeMo RL for reinforcement learning. Shopify has post-trained NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning for the GraphQL subagent integrated into Sidekick, Shopify’s AI assistant for merchants. The subagent retrieves store data for several Sidekick features, including Sidekick Pulse, which researches a merchant’s store and recommends ways to improve it.
Read All NVIDIA in Europe Announcements
On Shopify’s internal benchmark, the post-trained model surpasses a leading frontier model in accuracy while cutting serving costs by 90% and delivering responses 7x faster. Beyond Sidekick, NVIDIA CCluster vLLM inference optimization software helped Shopify achieve 4.5x faster performance and up to 12x lower inference cost across five additional use cases: catalog enrichment, merchant assistant, e-commerce shopping simulation, product taxonomy classification, and merchant and buyer recommendations.
#NVIDIA#Shopify#Sidekick#Nemotron 3.5 Lightning#Zooplus#Infosys#Photoroom#Vestiaire Collective#Omi#L'Oréal#Otto Group#Mirakl