AI
Shopify’s CEO says that his employers must “demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI” before they grow their teams.
And the ecommerce company will also add “AI usage questions to our performance and peer review,” said CEO Tobi Lutke in an edict to staff.
Shopify, which reported revenues of $8.8 billion in 2024, says it is using AI “to make customer communications more efficient” as well as to underpin its “Sidekick” commerce assistant for merchant-onboarding.
Its own “Magic” AI systems are “built on a combination of Shopify's proprietary data and the world’s leading large language models (LLMs)” and include text-to-image generation (“trained on a diverse dataset of images, with a focus on ecommerce and product presentation”) abilities.
Shopify CEO: We’re all in on this!
“AI will totally change Shopify, our work, and the rest of our lives. We’re all in on this” said Lutke in a leaked memo which he subsequently shared – emphasising that “reflexive AI usage” was a “baseline expectation.”
What would your team look like if you already had autonomous AI agents on it, he added? “This can… lead to really fun discussions and projects.”
Prescient, held some commentators. But for others the edict struck a jarring note – “I feel like some of this is so silly” said Andy McMahon, a principal AI & MLOps engineer at Barclays and guest lecturer on AI at the University of Oxford. “The focus should be on outcomes,” he added.
“Good to encourage experimentation but almost enforcing like this seems like it could be counter-productive to me,” he noted on LinkedIn.
Warning staff of “stagnation”, Lutke however commented bluntly that “Frankly I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow.”
eChai Ventures start-up network founder Jatin Chaudhary described the take as “one of the clearest founder perspectives yet on how deeply AI is shifting the way we work, build, and think”-- and Lutke’s certainly not alone in the evangelising. Even in the public sector, UK PM Kier Starmer called for AI to be used across the civil service last month, with a mantra that nobody should spend “substantive time” on a task that could be done better and quicker by AI.
Jonathan Gardiner, Head of Strategy at Linfox Logistics (Asia’s largest privately-owned logistics company) also had concerns, posting in a discussion on the memo that “it sounds as though this could lead to an toxic culture where everyone smiles and waves and pretends to use AI whilst forced to always say positive things about the ideology.”
“Is this extreme position one that all executive teams should adopt? Not necessarily. Should executive teams be more intentional about their position on AI? Increasingly yes” said Cameron Moll, Chief Design Officer at “digital product” firm Desquared.
Views on the memo? We'd love to hear them.