Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke: Employees Must Learn to Use AI Effectively

Shopify now considers the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by employees to be a “baseline expectation,” CEO Tobias Lütke said in an internal memo that he posted on X after learning it had been leaked.

Using AI is critical at a time when merchants and entrepreneurs are leveraging the technology and when Shopify is tasked with making its software the best platform on which they can develop their businesses, Lütke said in the memo.

“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,” he said. “For that we need to be absolutely ahead.”

Lütke said in the post that he is using AI all the time and that he invited employees to tinker with the technology last summer, but that his statement at the time was “too much of a suggestion.”

Now, he said, he wants to change that perception because continuous improvement is expected of everyone at Shopify and AI can deliver necessary capabilities.

“Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify,” Lütke said in the memo. “It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance.”

Lütke said in the memo that Shopify will add questions about AI usage to its performance and peer review questionnaire, that employees are expected to share what they learn about AI with their colleagues, and that teams who want to ask for more headcount and resources must demonstrate why AI cannot do what they need done.

“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,” Lütke wrote in the memo.

Eighty-two percent of workers across several industries who use generative AI (GenAI) at least weekly agree that it can increase productivity, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Workers Say Fears About GenAI Taking Their Jobs Is Overblown.”

The report also found that 50% of those who use GenAI weekly worry that the technology could eventually eliminate their specific job, compared to 24% of those who are unfamiliar with it.