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BERLIN, GERMANY - DECEMBER 14: The corporate logo of e-commerce company Shopify hangs at the ...
More building that contains the offices of Shopify Commerce Germany GmbH on December 14, 2023 in Berlin, Germany. Shopify is a leading, Canada-based company that enables online and brick-and-mortar commerce. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) The business world is talking about an internal memo that got released to the general public where Toby Lutke at Shopify is talking about employees integrating AI into their jobs.
Saying that “AI is now a baseline expectation,” the memo essentially asks employees to use AI reflexively, and integrate it into whatever they are doing in their jobs. “Our task here at Shopify is to make our software unquestionably the best canvas on which to develop the best businesses of the future,” Lutke writes. “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.” Why is that kind of proactive movement necessary? Lutke argues that it’s about the times, and the speed at which innovation is proceeding. Here’s a part of the memo where Lutke sets the stage for asking employees to make this leap, noting how he has been talking about this kind of innovation for a while: “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,” Lutke adds.
Essentially, it seems, we are almost halfway through a year where the realities around AI are quickly taking hold. With the agentic approach, we are seeing AI “unleashed” to do a wide range of human tasks. That means there is a tremendous need for companies to catch up.
As ballast, Lutke cites the “Alice in Wonderland” scenario, where in the Red Queen‘s race, participants have to keep running, in order not to fall behind. This, he suggests, is key in AI too. “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.” For those who are wondering what this kind of change is going to look like, there’s more clarity in a piece attached to the bottom of the memo titled “What This Means.
” First, there’s more on the metaphor of forward movement: “Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.” Elsewhere, he specifies that AI should be part of prototypes, and suggests that the company will add AI questions to performance and peer review questionnaires.
Also, in this paragraph, Lutke also mentions something that rings true to me as an AI user – that you have to be persistent, and not just give up at the first challenge. “My sense is that a lot of people give up after writing a prompt and not getting the ideal thing back immediately,” he writes. “Learning to prompt and load context is important, and getting peers to provide feedback on how this is going will be valuable.
” So often, with ChatGPT or image diffusion tools or any other models, that first prompt just doesn’t get you even close to what you want. Working with a model patiently almost always brings dividends. This part of the memo also got a lot of attention: “Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.
” To many, this translates this way: hire an AI, and not a human. This, on its own, tends to trigger concerns about job displacement in a world where AI is taking over a lot of knowledge work currently. But it’s the reality.
Whether or not people like it, there’s the trend to the means of production being “commodified” (in the words of one of my favorite podcasters, Nathaniel Whittemore) – and that necessitates this kind of move by business. Presumably, other companies will follow Shopify. They may not do it in the same way, or at the same pace, but the sea change will continue – just look at cloud computing, where over a decade, most companies moved from on-premises data systems to vendors offering remote storage and compute.
As a side note, we might actually reverse a lot of that cloud change, as companies run edge LLMs on internal devices. But my point is that we’re going to see a race toward the new AI technology in whatever form leadership prefers at any given company. I could quote another of my friends, Jeremy Wertheimer, who appeared at past Imagination in Action events as a keynote speaker.
When he does present, Wertheimer has been direct about the ramifications of AI for new career pros, a younger generation of workers. All of that requires thinking ahead. So this move at Shopify is probably just the tip of the spear.
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