The time of compulsary AI use at work is starting
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Summary:
This is a short article and the interpretation is very personal, so it was easier to just write this one myself.
On 8 April 2025, the CEO of Shopify released an internal memo to staff on X.com, after it was leaked.
The full memo is shown below, but they summary is that all staff are now required to use AI as a “reflexive” action in all things they do. They have been given all of the AI tools they need, and are expected to understand and use them for everything.
The other key message is this:
“Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”
While this doesn’t say that they will start replacing staff with AI, it’s almost certain they will, and it’s just as likely that will start with the staff who are slowest to adopt AI.
This has people talking, but I have no doubt this will quickly become common place. I personally would not hire someone who hadn’t adopted AI in any role that involves a large amount of knowledge work. This clearly applies for coding roles, but there isn’t a role in a tech company where I can’t see AI increasing everyone’s productivity by 50% to 200% or more.
For a time there are going to be a lot of people pushing back against this, possibly even you as you read this. But I doubt you will get much push back from anyone who has fully adopted AI because the benefits are very clear and very significant.
If you think that firing staff for not using AI is harsh, what about an employee who refused to use computers at work? What if they preferred a typewriter for writing and regular mail for communication? I doubt you would allow that for any staff involved in knowledge work, but AI is just another form of technology and I have no doubt that refusing to learn and use AI will quickly become just as crazy as refusing to use a computer.
So, while I might not agree with every single statement in the memo, such as the claim of some staff getting 100X (not 100%) increases in productivity in some tasks, I completely agree that the time for “reflexive” use of AI has already arrived and anyone not using AI for almost everything they do on a computer is already starting to fall behind those who do.
To wrap this up, the question often comes back to “when will AI replace humans”. That is not the important question for businesses. The question is how productive can someone be when using AI versus someone who isn’t. If you have a team of five doctors, lawyers, marketers, coders, creatives or engineers, if four people with AI can do the work of five people and you can save 20%, wouldn’t you want to do that. (Clearly if you can have five people do the work of six and you have the revenue to support that, you should, but that is still one person who would have been hired but now won’t be). What about if three can do the work of five? Or two? Or even one? We are a long way off AI being able to replace that last person, but in some areas it is already possible for one person to do the work of five if they make heavy use of AI.
And remember… AI today is the worst it will be going forward. So even if AI can’t replace four people in every team of five, that time is almost certainly coming, maybe faster than you think.
Full Memo
Team,
We are entering a time where more merchants and entrepreneurs could be created than any other in history. We often talk about bringing down the complexity curve to allow more people to choose this as a career. Each step along the entrepreneurial path is rife with decisions requiring skill, judgement and knowledge. Having AI alongside the journey and increasingly doing not just the consultation, but also doing the work for our merchants is a mindblowing step function change here. Our task here at Shopify is to make our software unquestionably the best canvas on which to develop the best businesses of the future. We do this by keeping everyone cutting edge and bringing all the best tools to bear so our merchants can be more successful than they themselves used to imagine. For that we need to be absolutely ahead.
Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify
Maybe you are already there and find this memo puzzling. In that case you already use AI as a thought partner, deep researcher, critic, tutor, or pair programmer. I use it all the time, but even I feel I’m only scratching the surface. It’s the most rapid shift to how work is done that I’ve seen in my career and I’ve been pretty clear about my enthusiasm for it: you’ve heard me talk about AI in weekly videos, podcasts, town halls, and… Summit! Last summer I used agents to create my talk , and presented about that. I did this as a call to action and invitation for everyone to tinker with AI, to dispel any scepticism or confusion that this matters at all levels. Many of you took up the call, and all of us who did have been in absolute awe of the new capabilities and tools that AI can deliver to augment our skills, crafts, and fill in our gaps.
What we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by… using it a lot. It’s just too unlike everything else. The call to tinker with it was the right one, but it was too much of a suggestion. This is what I want to change here today. We also learned that, as opposed to most tools, AI acts as a multiplier. We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves. I’ve seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done.
In my On Leadership memo years ago, I described Shopify as a red queen race based on the Alice in Wonderland story—you have to keep running just to stay still. In a company growing 20-40% year over year, you must improve by at least that every year just to re-qualify. This goes for me as well as everyone else.
This sounds daunting, but given the nature of the tools, this doesn’t even sound terribly ambitious to me anymore. It’s also exactly the kind of environment that our top performers tell us they want. Learning together, surrounded by people who also are on their own journey of personal growth and working on worthwhile, meaningful, and hard problems is precisely the environment Shopify was created to provide. This represents both an opportunity and a requirement, deeply connected to our core values of Be a Constant Learner and Thrive on Change. These aren’t just aspirational phrases—they’re fundamental expectations that come with being a part of this world-class team. This is what we founders wanted, and this is what we built.
What This Means
1. Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. 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. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.
2. AI must be part of your GSD Prototype phase. The prototype phase of any GSD project should be dominated by AI exploration. Prototypes are meant for learning and creating information. AI dramatically accelerates this process. You can learn to produce something that other team mates can look at, use, and reason about in a fraction of the time it used to take.
3. We will add AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire. Learning to use AI well is an unobvious skill. My sense is that a lot of people give up after writing a prompt and not getting the ideal thing back immediately. Learning to prompt and load context is important, and getting peers to provide feedback on how this is going will be valuable.
4. Learning is self directed, but share what you learned. You have access to as much of the cutting edge AI tools as possible.There is chat.shopify.io, which we had for years now. Developers have proxy, Copilot, Cursor, Claude code, all pre-tooled and ready to go. We’ll learn and adapt together as a team. We’ll be sharing Ws (and Ls!) with each other as we experiment with new AI capabilities, and we’ll dedicate time to AI integration in our monthly business reviews and product development cycles. Slack and Vault have lots of places where people share prompts that they developed, like #revenue-ai-use-cases and #ai-centaurs.
** 5. Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.** What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.
6. Everyone means everyone. This applies to all of us—including me and the executive team.
The Path Forward
AI will totally change Shopify, our work, and the rest of our lives. We’re all in on this! I couldn’t think of a better place to be part of this truly unprecedented change than being here. You don’t just get a front-row seat, but are surrounded by a whole company learning and pushing things forward together. Our job is to figure out what entrepreneurship looks like in a world where AI is universally available. And I intend for us to do the best possible job of that, and to do that I need everyone’s help. I already laid out a lot of the AI projects in the themes this year- our roadmap is clear, and our product will better match our mission. What we need to succeed is our collective sum total skill and ambition at applying our craft, multiplied by AI, for the benefit of our merchants.
-tobi
CEO Shopify