- Shopify is going all-in on AI, with CEO Tobi Lütke telling staff that no new hires will be made unless they can prove AI can’t do the job. The move signals a growing shift where AI skills aren’t just encouraged but becoming a core job requirement.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke has told staffers the company will only make new hires if employees can prove AI can’t do the work required.
In a memo shared with Shopify staff late last month, Lutke said before asking for more headcount and resources “teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.” He added that this question could “lead to really fun discussions and projects.”
The broader memo, which was shared by Lutke on X, declared that effective use of AI was now “a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify.” In it, Lutke encouraged staffers to tinker with the technology, learn new skills, and share their findings with colleagues with the aim of making AI usage reflexive within the company.
“Learning is self-directed, but share what you learned,” Lutke wrote. “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.”
Lutke also said the company would be adding AI usage questions to performance and peer review questionnaires to check up on employee progress.
“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,” he wrote.
The CEO also told staff that the new rules and guidelines on AI applied to everyone at the company including himself and the executive team, stressing that AI skills were essential to work at the company.
“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,” he said.
Not the only CEO with AI demands
Lutke is not the only CEO to encourage AI adoption in the workplace.
Several other tech companies have pushed staff to up-skill on the tech and rolled out internal company tools to help staffers use AI securely at work. For example, Klarna CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, has said that the company’s AI chatbot does the work of 700 customer service agents and has spoken openly about AI eventually driving down headcount at the company.
There is evidence that AI can make workers more productive in their jobs, and is great at picking up admin tasks and busy work. However, AI tools like chatbots are often prone to errors, known as hallucinations, which have already tripped some people up at work and led to some workers losing their jobs.
There are other concerns around using AI at work, such as data security, the potential for bias and discrimination, and a lack of transparency.
Representatives for Shopify did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune, made outside normal working hours.
