Before asking for more staff, the team needs to be told why it can't achieve its goals with AI. Shopify CEO publishes new company dogma

Here is what he wrote. Next is direct speech.

Team,

We are entering a time when more salespeople and entrepreneurs may emerge than at any time in history. We often talk about lowering the difficulty curve to allow more people to choose this career path. Every step on the entrepreneurial path is full of decisions that require skill, judgment, and knowledge. Bringing artificial intelligence into the process and increasingly doing not just consulting but also working for our salespeople is a dramatic shift in role.

Our mission here at Shopify is to make our software the absolute best canvas on which to build the best businesses of the future. We do this by supporting everyone on the front lines and using all the best tools so that our merchants can be more successful than they ever imagined. To do that, we need to be absolutely ahead of the curve.

You might already be doing this and thinking, what’s the big deal with this reminder? If so, you’re already using AI as a thinking partner, a deep researcher, a critic, a tutor, or a pair programmer. I use it all the time, but even I feel like I’m only exploring superficially. It’s the fastest shift in the way work gets done that I’ve seen in my career, and I’ve made my enthusiasm for it pretty clear: you’ve heard me talk about AI in weekly videos, podcasts, board meetings, and… the summit!

Last summer, I used agents to create my talk and present it. I did it as a call to action and an invitation for everyone to experiment with AI, to dispel any skepticism or misunderstanding that it matters at all levels. Many of you took up the challenge, and all of us who did were completely excited about the new possibilities and tools that AI can offer to expand our skills, expertise, and fill our gaps.

What we’ve already learned is that using AI skillfully is a skill that needs to be carefully mastered… by using it a lot. It’s just too unlike anything else. The call to tinker with it was right, but it was too insistent a proposition.

That’s what I want to change here today. We’ve also learned that, unlike most tools, AI acts as a multiplier. We’ve all been fortunate enough to work with amazing colleagues, people who are doing 10x more than we ever thought possible. That’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that for the first time, we’re seeing new tools enable us to grow 10x more. I’ve seen many of these people take on incredible tasks that we wouldn’t have even thought of before, and use AI thoughtfully and brilliantly to get the job done 100x faster.

In my Leadership memo many years ago, I described Shopify as a red queen race based on the story of Alice in Wonderland—you have to keep running to stay in place. In a company that grows 20-40% annually, you need to improve your level by at least that amount every year to keep growing. That applies to me and everyone else.

It sounds daunting, but given the nature of the tools, it doesn’t even seem like an overly ambitious goal to me. It’s also the kind of environment our top performers say they want. Learning together, surrounded by people who are also on their own personal growth journeys and working on valuable, meaningful, and challenging problems, is exactly the kind of environment Shopify was built for. It’s both an opportunity and a requirement, and it’s closely aligned with our core values: «Be a lifelong learner» and «Thrive through change.» These aren’t just aspirational phrases—they’re fundamental expectations of being part of this world-class team. That’s what we, the founders, wanted, and that’s what we created.

What does this mean

1. Effective use of AI is now a fundamental expectation for everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool for all trades today, and its importance will only grow. Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible to avoid learning the skills to apply AI to your business. You can try, but honestly, I don’t think it’s going to work today, and certainly not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost inevitable, and stagnation is a slow decline. If you’re not moving up, you’re going to slide down.
2. AI should be part of the GSD (Get Stuff Done) prototyping phase. The prototyping phase of any GSD project should be largely focused on exploring AI. Prototypes are for learning and creating information. AI greatly speeds up this process. You can learn to create something that other team members can look at, use, and think about in much less time than before.
3. We will be adding questions about using AI to our performance and peer review questionnaire. Learning to use AI well is a non-obvious skill. I feel like a lot of people give up after they type in a query and don’t get a perfect result right away. It’s important to learn how to prompt and load context, and it’s also helpful to get feedback from colleagues on how it’s going.
4. The learning is self-paced, but share what you learn. You have access to as many cutting-edge AI tools as possible. There’s chat.shopify.io, which we’ve had for years. The developers have proxy, Copilot, Cursor, Claude code, all pre-built and ready to go. We’ll learn and adapt together as a team. We’ll share experiences experimenting with new AI capabilities, and we’ll also dedicate time to integrating AI into our monthly business reviews and product development cycles. There are lots of places on Slack and Vault where people share tips they’ve developed, like #revenue-ai-use-cases and #ai-centaurs.
5. Before asking for more staff and resources, teams need to demonstrate why they can’t achieve the desired outcome with AI. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really interesting discussions and projects.
6. Everyone is everyone. This applies to all of us, including me and the leadership team.

The way forward

Artificial intelligence is going to completely change Shopify, our work, and the rest of our lives. We’re all in this together! I couldn’t imagine a better place to be a part of this truly unprecedented change than being here. You don’t just get a front row seat, you’re surrounded by an entire company learning and moving things forward together.

Our mission is to figure out what entrepreneurship looks like in a world where AI is ubiquitous. And I intend for us to do it as well as possible, and I need everyone’s help to do that. I’ve already outlined many AI projects in this year’s themes — our roadmap is clear, and our product will better align with our mission. To succeed, we need our collective sum of skills and ambition in applying our craft, multiplied by AI, to the benefit of our sellers.