Inside Shopify’s company-wide Gen AI push under Tobias Lütke
- While traditional banks and credit unions have adopted a "slow and careful" approach to generative AI, limiting deployment to back-office operations, fintech companies like Shopify are taking radically different paths by integrating AI throughout their entire organizations and customer-facing products.
- CEO Tobias Lütke's leaked manifesto reveals a mandatory AI-usage policy that affects everything from employee performance reviews to resource allocation, but this aggressive approach highlights unresolved challenges around error management, equitable implementation across organizational hierarchies, and the need for proper safeguards in this new paradigm of AI-augmented work.
For our content series “Beyond the hype: AI in Financial Services” I covered how traditional banks and credit unions are deploying Gen AI in their operations. A clear pattern emerged in those case studies: Some Gen AI projects are already in use but their approach remains constrained to the back office.
Today’s micro case study sheds light on just how different fintech approaches to the tech have been. Where FIs have made “slow and careful” their mantra, fintech leaders like Shopify’s Tobias Lütke are boldly changing everything from hiring to customer facing interfaces with Gen AI.
Shopify’s Gen AI strategy wraps around employees and customers
Lütke has made two major moves to integrate Gen AI into the company: First, he is changing how work is done inside the company and second, how Shopify’s customers get their own work done through its products.
The back story
Earlier this year, Lütke’s intentions for Gen AI became public when a manifesto of his leaked into the press. The document gave insight into the cultural shift Lütke is planning for Shopify, one which would mandate use of Gen AI for all employees, and will strong-arm the use of the technology in future hiring for the company.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Lütke acknowledged the leak and posted the manifesto in full. In the document the CEO shares how he has been using the technology himself to create his industry talks and how he had previously urged his employees to “tinker” with the technology. But Lütke’s call to action on Gen AI proved to be “too much of a suggestion” in his opinion. With the manifesto, the CEO decided to take the choice of using Gen AI away and made its usage a “baseline” for Shopify employees in his manifesto.
The masterplan
Lütke’s manifesto focuses on six major points:
