Shopify CEO Says Staffers Need To Prove Jobs Can't Be Done By AI Before Asking for More Headcount (cnbc.com)
- Reference: 0176964307
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/08/1518213/shopify-ceo-says-staffers-need-to-prove-jobs-cant-be-done-by-ai-before-asking-for-more-headcount
- Source link: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/07/shopify-ceo-prove-ai-cant-do-jobs-before-asking-for-more-headcount.html
> "What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?" Lutke wrote in the memo, which was sent to employees late last month. "This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects." Lutke also said there's a "fundamental expectation" across Shopify that employees embrace AI in their daily work, saying it has been a "multiplier" of productivity for those who have used it.
>
> "I've seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn't even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done," Lutke wrote. The company, which sells web-based software that helps online retailers manage sales and run their operations, will factor AI usage into performance reviews, he added.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/07/shopify-ceo-prove-ai-cant-do-jobs-before-asking-for-more-headcount.html
Re: (Score:3)
> Never heard of this shoplify, what's the product it manufactures and how is it different from the competition?
Assuming you aren't joking, then its one of the largest e-commerce platforms around. There is a good chance on of the many online stores you use make use of it, for their shopfront.
You can also check Wikipedia: [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify
Re: (Score:2)
Correct, of course. If you are trying to buy something on a website and it is really really annoying to use, that is because the buying part of it is provided by Shopify.
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"it is really really annoying to use"
Actually that sounds like Amazon.
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Buying from Amazon is easy, buying from SOME Shopify sites is a nightmare.
Re: Not sure what this is so I'll ask... (Score:2)
Shopify sites that suck can be chalked up mostly to bad implementations, IMO. Regardless of vendor, the site proprietor is probably going to fuck up their instance through incompetence/negligence. That side of the e-commerce business is cutthroat with razor thin margins.
Re: (Score:2)
> Shopify sites that suck can be chalked up mostly to bad implementations, IMO.
Having written (from scratch) the data feed from an ERP system to / from Shopify, you are right: implementation is king here. Screw that up, and your site is toast.
The data feed I wrote transfers Shopify orders into the ERP every 10 minutes, order updates daily and inventory updates twice a day. It took six months to write this interface, and getting gift cards to work was a right pain (how many notes do you see with confusing discounts and gift cards?).
> Regardless of vendor, the site proprietor is probably going to fuck up their instance through incompetence/negligence.
If it weren't for the automatic feeds, the business wo
Re: (Score:1)
What is this "market cap"? The one that shrunk 20% over the last two weeks? Isn't it a bit too tight for your big brain, Brett?
Him included? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am sure that he is excluded from this asinine rule, no?
In Saudi Arabia (Score:2)
Women of the ruling class can be found lounging around in bikinis.
The rules do not apply to the ruling class under any circumstances.
So that gets applied to the CEO too right? (Score:4, Insightful)
A CEO telling your workers that AI certainly fill in for actual humans, when the CEO themselves could be replaced by a glorified chatbot hooked up to some bank accounts? Maybe the AI would at least realize that asking people to prove a negative is fucking dumb.
Prove a negative? (Score:3)
Are there any AI logicians with anything to say about that?
Re: (Score:3)
Well, "dumb CEO is dumb" seems appropriate here. Although I am not "AI logician". I prefer my logic to work...
Simple, AI wastes time, resources and effort. (Score:2)
Ignoring the incredible privacy violation that AI represents, which is a level of digital molestation, that would scare Epstein, AI can't really do anything on its own, safely. A human still has to handhold AI, and much like a Jr Engineer who never gains skill, you spend all your time helping them, and getting nothing done for yourself. Why can't AI do it? Show me it can, to the level of a skilled, expert, and, if you do that, sure. Then we can move to the second major task, maintaining privacy.
Re: (Score:3)
> Ignoring the incredible privacy violation that AI represents, which is a level of digital molestation, that would scare Epstein, AI can't really do anything on its own, safely. A human still has to handhold AI, and much like a Jr Engineer who never gains skill, you spend all your time helping them, and getting nothing done for yourself.
This. AI hasn't shown it can think. And one would hope you have employees who can think.
This morning I saw [1]this video [youtube.com] on Sabine Hossenfelder's YouTube channel. TL/DW: She talked about a paper whose authors examined how LLMs can predict tokens and appear to get the right answer, without actually understanding what they are doing. The kicker for me was when the researchers asked the LLM to solve an arithmetic problem, and then asked it how it got that answer. The latter explanation did not at all match what t
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wzOetb-D3w
Re: Simple, AI wastes time, resources and effort. (Score:2)
The help needs more help than they provide. Classic tech startup bullshit, whether with bodies or AI.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yes. But he's talking about justifying *headcount increases*. It's a really good idea to scrutinize headcount increase requests because they're often mindless and lazy.
The first time I had a management job where I had to do a department budget, I went around to the other managers and asked them how they prepared their budgets. The answers floored me. Typically it was "I take last year's budget and add 5% to all the line items." What about new things the business plan calls for your department to
When you have no strategy, make that "AI" (Score:2)
A new type of utterly dumb CEOs makes its appearance...
Staffers Need To Prove Jobs Can't Be Done By AI? (Score:3)
> Shopify CEO Says Staffers Need To Prove Jobs Can't Be Done By AI Before Asking for More Headcount
In any normal business you'd expect management to assess whether a job can be done by AI, and that includes practical pilot testing, before deciding whether or not to introduce AI instead of offloading this on staff. If I was working for Shopify I'd go looking for a new employer with less stupid and lazy management.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. They should all quit and let the CEO try to have everything handled by AI and see how well that would work.
Re: (Score:2)
>> Shopify CEO Says Staffers Need To Prove Jobs Can't Be Done By AI Before Asking for More Headcount
> In any normal business you'd expect management to assess whether a job can be done by AI, and that includes practical pilot testing, before deciding whether or not to introduce AI instead of offloading this on staff. If I was working for Shopify I'd go looking for a new employer with less stupid and lazy management.
I might be taking the wrong meaning from his comments (from the fine article)... but giving him a little credit. I didn't read his thoughts to mean "I will replace you with AI" but rather heard "before I hire you an assistant, I need you to show me a job that AI cannot, instead, do". It caused me to think in terms of "hey, if you are ready to hire, are you sure you need another body if you could instead put some AI tools to work to amplify what you're already doing?"
the wave of the future (Score:2)
"The company, which sells web-based software that helps online retailers manage sales and run their operations"
They are selling software, that's their product. Presumably they have a bunch of programmers that wrote the software and it may be a large part of their workforce.
"embrace AI in their daily work, it has been a “multiplier” of productivity for those who have used it."
And he is absolutely correct. You can get a massive productivity boost by using AI assistance for writing and maintaining
Re:the wave of the future - Linux (Score:3)
When I worked for a rather large corporation, I estimated that I was about 100 times productive on Linux as Windows, simply because Linux was designed from the ground up for engineers.
Even when I mentioned this to the powers that be, they weren't the least bit interested in change. I had to actually change jobs to get back to a Linux workstation. If productivity really was the issue, there wouldn't be a software engineering department in the country that ran Windows. (or at least not one without WSL ena
Re: (Score:2)
I've had some similar experiences. I think this time its different though.
Software developers are expensive and the productivity gains with AI are pretty obvious to the people who actually use it. Like it or not the shift is already occurring.
"In 2024, there were roughly 152,000 roles eliminated across 549 tech companies, according to Layoffs.fyi."
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I can believe that you were ignored. A claim of 100x performance improvement sounds like bullshit to anyone. I'm having difficulty imagining a scenario in which your claim might actually be realistic. Even decades ago when Windows was an unstable mess that was lucky to go more than an hour or two without crashing, it's rather difficult to imagine alternatives more than doubling productivity, much less increasing it one hundred fold.
Re: (Score:2)
From what I've seen with technology this only works if the person using the new technology understands how to use the new technology.
Yes, you can get a massive productivity boost but you can also get a massive productivity drain.
You would think that in this day and age every mass mailing would be personalized at least with the client name. Large organizations mostly manage this but often it's just a form letter like the ones printed in the past. I just got one the other day from the bank addressed to; Dea
Re: (Score:2)
> "embrace AI in their daily work, it has been a “multiplier” of productivity for those who have used it."
> And he is absolutely correct. You can get a massive productivity boost by using AI assistance for writing and maintaining software. ...
I guess it depends on what you do, but I've found more often than not, Copilot usually gives me something that doesn't work and I have to discard its suggestion and do it myself. It's decent for writing unit tests, some of the time; other times it just screws up the code. I certainly don't feel threatened by it because it works so poorly and I don't see any massive productivity boost by using it. "AI assistance" is definitely a YMMV sort of thing from what I've experienced.
The employees should just all quit... (Score:2)
Let the CEO try to have everything done by AI and see how well that would work.
Re: (Score:2)
> Let the CEO try to have everything done by AI and see how well that would work.
Funny!... but I think you accidentally restated his intent: if I need people, I'll hire people; if AI can help my people do cool stuff, then let's implement that before hiring more people.
and when the AI bill blows up? (Score:2)
and when the AI bill blows up?
Another rich clown, hopefully not orange (Score:2)
Someone should use AI to make this moron look like the clown that he is.
So Find AI Replacement for their Jobs (Score:1)
So the CEO wants the staff to figure out how to use AI to replace their jobs. I'm sure they love that idea.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, it'll be fun!
AI has intelligence of a dog (Score:2)
As Yann Lecun says, AI has the intelligence of a dog. I think that means only higher level management functions can be safely replaced by it.
Shopify's Hunger Games: may the best prompt win! (Score:5, Insightful)
It’s not collaboration if you’re competing with the thing you’re supposed to be collaborating with. In the future, your job interview will be a Turing test—and the AI is on the panel.
What’s being sold as an “AI-first” innovation strategy is, in reality, a reframing of resource constraints as creative empowerment. Shopify’s CEO is using optimistic language—“fun discussions,” “brilliant usage of AI,” “100X the work”—to reposition what is effectively a cost-cutting policy as a visionary approach to productivity.
But the underlying message to employees is clear:
Prove your role can’t be automated before asking for help.
That’s not collaboration. It’s competition masquerading as collaboration. AI isn’t being used to augment human potential—it’s being positioned as the metric by which human value is measured. And anyone who’s worked in a large corporation will recognize the pattern: bring in a shiny new system, claim it’s here to assist, then gradually push employees to train it, measure against it, and eventually get displaced by it.
I’ve lived through this before—watching long-time employees told to train third-party contractors who then replaced them. The only difference now is that the contractor has been rebranded as “autonomous AI,” and the pink slips are wrapped in a TED Talk.
The philosophical problem is that workers are now being asked to justify their relevance not on the basis of creativity, judgment, or experience—but on their ability to beat automation at its own game. That’s not a collaborative future. That’s just a new face on the same old race to the bottom.
Re: (Score:2)
May the odds be ever in your favor.
Use AI (Score:3)
The answer is clear: ask AI to write up the justification. If the justification is valid, then the guy shouldn't be fired. If the justification is invalid, then clearly AI could not do the job, so the guy shouldn't be fired.
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Considering that LLM's can best be describe as predictive language machine and are shockingly bad at even the [1]simplest logic puzzle [futurism.com] companies should give it a wide berth with regard to any HR decisions. Hopefully, Tobi Lutke CEO career will pancake like the lawyer who used Chatgp to [2]research cases. [abc.net.au]
I know Tobi will weasel out of any negative repercussions but a boy can dream.
[1] https://futurism.com/logic-question-stumps-ai
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-09/lawyers-blame-chatgpt-for-tricking-them-into-citing-fake-cases/102462028
"Fun" (Score:2)
> "This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects."
I'd really like to know this asshat's definition of "fun".
I've said it before... (Score:2)
So many companies are trying to slash headcount in favour of "AI". Those people who are losing their jobs are, in fact, also customers of the various businesses which are shedding staff. Soon, those companies' actions will result in a lack of people able to pay them for the services and products they offer. Do they not understand that the economy is a cooperative ecosystem, and that when you effectively bankrupt a large part of it the whole thing becomes unsustainable?
Widespread adoption of AI is a race to
Prove that negative (Score:2)
That's right. The burden of proof is on whoever has the lower position in the hierarchy.
Re: (Score:2)
Buddy, must of use here are Full Stack DevOps Site Reliability Engineers. Twenty years ago this would have been thirty different specialties. None of us have gotten 30x pay raises unless we made our own startup to exploit some young idiots fresh out of college.
Luigi meet Tobi (Score:2)
Will be back in little bit to see how you two are getting along.
Yet another stupid CEO (Score:2)
The burden of the proof is on you, moron.
Until Death Do You Part. Your Employer. (Score:3)
> "What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?..This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects."
Abusing premature-AI to dismiss adding headcount is also known as a hiring freeze. A trend that could become rather permanent. Among every other CEO who read the “fun” report from that “exciting” project titled Maximizing CEO Pay and Bonuses through Permanent Hiring Freezes.
As if Greed is any less predictable.
Re: (Score:2)
That only works to the extent that the company has already hired the best employees that it can. Every business knows that just doesn't happen and why many of them will try to have 5% turnover on a yearly basis. Sometimes standing pat is the best option, but most of the time it's better to discard a few cards and see if you can draw better. The problem too often is that management can't actually tell when it has a good hand or not.
In other news... (Score:2)
Shopify job listings all now state:
"Candidates must be able to demonstrate the ability draw a human hand with the correct number of fingers and a Rubik's Cube with correct coloring".
Ok (Score:2)
Shopify is already one of the worst POS systems I've ever seen. The only thing worse is anything made by Intuit, though they have recently discontinued their POS in favor of Shopify. Which makes sense, shitty software supporting other shitty software.
CEO should justify his job (Score:2)
Then the CEO also needs to justify his job can't done by AI. Sounds like it can.
[1]https://media.hubspot.com/can-... [hubspot.com]
[1] https://media.hubspot.com/can-you-replace-ceos-with-ai
I weep for the future of corporate America (Score:2)
... actually I fear for the future of all Americans, but that's a much deeper story.
okay, I'm just not using any shopify sites (Score:2)
If you're using shopify to run your store, well, sucks to be use. Choose a better shopping cart vendor.
Really fun discussions (Score:2)
"This question can lead to really fun discussions"
Yeah like what do you do all day, CEO guy, that a chatbot can't do? So far in the last 3 months, Copilot found 1 typo in a code review, wrote a bunch of non-working, not useful unit tests, and told me there is duplicate code somewhere, but couldn't be more specific. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I could "vibe code" a Pong clone, but that's not me getting 100x the work done.
"I've seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn't even have
Factor of performance reviews (Score:3)
The 25 year olds might not yet understand this, but "AI factored into perfromance reviews" from the people exploiting your labor means they want 100x productivity and you get 3% raise.
Good idea. (Score:2)
Let's start by applying that concept to the CEO position first.
Re: (Score:1)
Tobi is 100% a developer FYI of all the crazy things - core RoR programmer and all that as well.
Re: Good idea. (Score:2)
Great. The entire C-suite can be replaced by an AI and a software engineer. Management task are generally signal processing tasks anyway which AI is good at. The real work is done by the non-management position and AI is not very good at handling those tasks anyway.
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RoR doesn't count as programming surely.
Re: (Score:2)
Today's CEO exists this staff to leverage AI and deliver them better insights and analysis, faster, and also more accurate. The modern CEO, like their C-level counterparts, relies on the information from their team, their accumulated experience and wisdom, and examination of the overall environment and market(s) to make good decisions. AI can amplify the value of those inputs they use to do so.
The other C-level inhabitants are on their own, best of luck.
Re: (Score:2)
And of course, 'exists this' is properly spell checked as 'relies on'... No apology is sufficient.
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Actually nobody in my company who does actual work got more than 2.7% raise. Some got 0%. The CFO said we workers get paid enough already, but those poor Sheiks who invested in us through Blackrock Group want more stock buybacks to inflate their oceans of oil money.