Shopify's Enterprise blog has featured Netalico founder Mark Lewis as a leading voice on how AI is changing enterprise ecommerce migration. In the article How AI Is Making Ecommerce Migration Faster, More Predictable, Lewis is the primary expert source on what actually changes when AI enters a complex replatforming project, and, just as importantly, what does not.
For a Shopify Plus Premier Partner that has run AI-accelerated migrations and builds for mid-market and enterprise brands, being the agency Shopify turned to for this story is a meaningful signal. Here is what Mark told Shopify, and why it matters for any enterprise brand weighing a move to Shopify.
AI does not remove the risk. It moves it.
The headline idea Mark brought to the piece is that AI does not make migration risk disappear. It relocates it.
"AI is not a magic button that moves your business from one platform to another," Lewis told Shopify. "What it changes is where the risk lives."
That framing carries through the article. The hardest, highest-stakes part of a migration is still the thinking: which business logic is essential, which legacy behavior is platform debt, and which assumptions deserve to move to Shopify at all.
"The strategy is still the hardest and most important part," Lewis said. "AI doesn't change that. If anything it raises the stakes, because now you can execute a bad decision much faster."
In other words, AI is a force multiplier on judgment. Point it at a good plan and it compresses months of work into weeks. Point it at a bad plan and it ships the mistake faster.
"The robot used to work in the dark. Now it has eyes."
The biggest practical shift the article documents is in quality assurance. Migrations used to be checked by sampling a small slice of the catalog, often around five percent, because verifying every page by hand was impossible. AI changes the math.
"For years, our automated checks were basically reading code without ever seeing the page," Lewis said. "Now those same checks can actually look at what the customer sees, compare it against the old site, and flag the moment something doesn't line up. The robot used to work in the dark. Now it has eyes."
That is not a hypothetical. On one recent migration, an AI agent compared a migrated Shopify page against the source, traced the real pricing logic, and corrected the script in the same pass, before launch.
"It caught a bug that mattered," Lewis said. "If it had slipped through to launch, we'd have been showing the wrong price on more than 60% of the catalog."
Full-catalog QA instead of a five-percent sample is the difference between hoping a migration is correct and proving it.
Discipline that predates commerce
The Shopify piece traces this safety-net mindset back to before Netalico existed. Mark Lewis led a team in NASA's enterprise IT group before founding the agency, where code freezes preceded launches and nothing shipped without independent verification.
"You learn to build the safety net before you start the work, not after something breaks," he said.
That is the throughline of how Netalico approaches AI: use it aggressively to accelerate the work, and engineer the checks that catch problems early, while senior engineers keep control of the strategy and the judgment.
How Netalico runs AI-accelerated migrations
Netalico uses AI exactly the way the Shopify article describes. We apply it to the phases that historically generated the most uncertainty, data mapping, catalog cleanup, full-catalog QA, and the early proof that a complex requirement will actually work, so a working version of the store arrives in week one instead of month six. Senior engineers own the strategy, review everything that ships, and stay accountable from kickoff through launch.
That approach is why brands like Big Green Egg, Oatly, and Audio Advice trust Netalico with their Shopify and Shopify Plus work, and why the same team that builds a store continues to support and improve it on retainer after launch.
If you are planning a BigCommerce to Shopify migration or a Magento to Shopify Plus migration, this is the methodology you get: faster timelines, full-catalog verification, and a senior team that has shipped hundreds of Shopify builds.
Built for the AI-first commerce era
AI-accelerated migration is one piece of a larger shift. The same discipline that makes a migration predictable also prepares a store for how customers discover and buy in an AI-first market, from AI search visibility to agentic commerce. Netalico helps brands get ready on both fronts: see our generative engine optimization and AI search work and our agentic commerce readiness services, or learn more about founder Mark Lewis.
Work with a Shopify Plus Premier Partner
Read the full Shopify Enterprise article, How AI Is Making Ecommerce Migration Faster, More Predictable, then get in touch to talk through your migration or build with the team Shopify featured.
About Netalico. Netalico is a Shopify Plus Premier Partner founded in 2013 (a Shopify Partner since 2016) that builds, migrates, and supports stores for mid-market and enterprise DTC merchants in the $2M to $50M GMV range. Founder Mark Lewis brings an engineering background that includes enterprise systems work at NASA, and he serves as a fractional ecommerce CTO for several larger brands. The fully in-house, US-based team has delivered hundreds of Shopify builds and uses AI-accelerated development and migration with senior engineers keeping control of quality. The same team that builds your store supports it after launch on a retainer.
