Hiring in the Age of AI: What Shopify Understands That Others Don't

By Trailblaze Labs | Published 2025-04-09 | Strategy | 8 min read

Why Tobi Lütke's internal memo deserves your attention, especially if you run a business. Shopify is changing the default approach to work.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sent his team a clear message:

Before requesting new headcount, demonstrate why AI can't do the job.

The policy is grounded in something every business leader understands: constraints. Shopify is asking teams to examine the work before they add another person to do it.

Shopify is not alone in feeling pressure to do more with less. Its response puts a clear process around that pressure. This is not a blanket order to replace people. It is a change to the default approach to work, and it raises a useful question:

Are we still hiring for tasks that AI is already capable of doing?

What the Memo Actually Says

• AI-first is the default. Teams must consider AI before requesting human resources.
• No carve-outs. This applies to every team, including leadership and engineering.
• AI fluency is part of performance. How employees adopt and integrate AI will factor into reviews and evaluations.

The underlying philosophy is simple: In a world with AI, you shouldn't solve yesterday's problems with yesterday's headcount.

The memo became public, and Lütke stood behind it. That makes it more than an internal note. It is a practical operating policy other leaders can examine.

Why This Should Matter to Business Leaders

You are probably not running Shopify. You may not have thousands of engineers or a dedicated AI research team. The same pressure and opportunity still apply, and smaller companies usually have less room for a bad hire or a poorly designed process.

Here is how to translate Shopify's policy into action for your business:

1. Adopt AI as a first lens, not a last resort.

Too many teams still treat AI as something to try on the side. Lütke is saying the opposite: start with AI. Assume it can help, test that assumption, and then decide what still requires a person.

For your business, this might look like:

• Testing AI for sales outreach, qualification, and funnel management before hiring another SDR
• Using AI to draft job descriptions and SOPs, then review resumes, prepare interview questions, and challenge your assumptions
• Using AI to frame and analyze a finance question before sending a vague request to the finance team

You don't need full automation. But you do need intentional evaluation.

2. Train your team to experiment, not wait for permission.

Shopify is making AI fluency part of performance. That is a cultural requirement as much as a technical one.

If your team is waiting for step-by-step permission, progress will be slow. Give people room to test ideas, share what worked, and explain what did not. The goal is not prompt mastery. The goal is to make responsible experimentation part of the job.

This is how I started helping other businesses. I took the courses I built for our team at Loftwall and adapted them for other leaders. That work grew into training full teams to move from occasional experiments to repeatable ways of working.

3. Redefine what hiring means in this new era.

Hiring in the age of AI isn't about adding headcount. It's about adding capability. Sometimes that will still mean hiring a human. Other times it may mean investing in:

• AI-powered workflows
• Custom GPTs trained on your processes
• Zapier automations that free up hours per week

The best companies will not only hire better people. They will build better systems around them. James Clear makes this point well: you do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.

This is bigger than Shopify's memo

Lütke wrote the memo to align his teams around a new operating reality. Whether or not you adopt a formal AI policy, the questions behind it already belong in your planning process.

AI is now part of the hiring conversation because it forces us to ask better questions about how work gets done, what creates value, and where people should spend their time.

Where to start

Here is a simple version of Shopify's approach for small and midsize teams:

• Before filling a gap, test it with AI.
• When in doubt, assign it to a pilot, not a person.
• Make AI progress a regular part of team conversations.

You do not need a company-wide memo to begin. You need a consistent habit of examining the work before adding cost.

That habit can save time and build a team that adapts as the tools change.

Want to help your team work this way? Send me an email and we can talk through where to start.