Canadian online retail CEO making workers prove jobs can't be done by AI

It seems like Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Canadian online retail giant Shopify, is a big fan of AI. A new memo sent to all the company's employees says that using artificial intelligence (AI) is now an expectation.

The CEO shared the employee memo on Twitter because he claimed that it was already being leaked to the press. The preamble is fairly long before leading into six rules for Shopify workers to use AI more at work. First, "using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify."

The second rule is to use AI tools to help prototype new products since it can help you learn at a much faster rate, according to Lütke. Following that, he tells staff that the company is adding AI usage questions to its performance and peer review questionnaires. 

He's worried that a lot of people bounce off AI after using it for the first few times because it might give them an undesirable answer. Therefore, he's hoping that adding it to peer reviews will help people learn to prompt more effectively. Building on this, the fourth rule also aligns with people sharing AI findings.

Rule five is the final rule, stating that you need to demonstrate that AI can't do something before you can get approval to hire new people. This may be the hardest one for the company since it laid off a few hundred people across a few divisions last year.

I heard this internal memo of mine is being leaked right now, so here it is: pic.twitter.com/Qn12DY7TFF

— tobi lutke (@tobi) April 7, 2025

This isn't the first time Lütke has shown enthusiasm for AI online. At the end of March, he tweeted out a batch of AI-generated images of socks while talking about how AI can improve product photography. 

That said, even he points out that some of the images he's generated don't match the original baseline. Shopify also bought AI retail startup Vantage Discovery and told Betakit that it would be "supercharging" Shopify's work for both merchants and buyers."