Tobi Lütke

Tobi Lütke (born 1980) is a German-Canadian programmer who founded Shopify in Ottawa after building an online snowboard shop and deciding the store software was the better product. As founder-CEO he grew it into the commerce platform behind millions of merchants — while remaining a hands-on engineer who still ships code.

The memo heard round the industry

In April 2025, learning an internal memo was about to leak, Lütke published it himself on X under the headline “Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify.” The memo told employees that using AI effectively was no longer optional: AI competence would figure in performance and peer reviews, prototypes should start AI-first, and — the line that traveled furthest — before asking for more headcount or resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. He described colleagues using AI reflexively as getting “100X the work done,” and framed the company as a place where stagnation equals slow-motion failure.

The memo became the template for a wave of copycat policies — Fiverr, Duolingo, and others followed with AI-first mandates — and a flashpoint for critics who read “justify why AI can’t do it” as a hiring freeze in disguise and a recipe for pressure-driven, sloppy AI use. Lütke’s framing was the opposite: AI as a multiplier for people who learn it, and mastery of the tools as basic professional literacy, the way email or spreadsheets once were.