On April 7, 2025, Tobi Lutke posted on X what he confirmed was an internal memo he had sent to all Shopify employees. The full text is public and quotable. Two passages from that memo are worth focusing on for what they reveal about how the operating bar is shifting.
What the memo actually says
Lutke wrote that 'reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation' at Shopify and that 'we will add AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire.' He further wrote that 'before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.' Those are not paraphrases — they are direct quotes from the public memo Lutke himself published.
The structural decision underneath
The memo is interesting not because Lutke believes AI is useful — every CEO believes that publicly in 2025 and 2026. It is interesting because he made AI fluency an explicit gate on resource allocation. Headcount requests now have to clear an AI-use threshold before they are evaluated on traditional grounds. That is a structural change in how the company makes decisions about growth and capacity.
- Performance reviews now include AI usage as a measured dimension.
- Hiring requests must justify why AI cannot do the work first.
- The expectation is set at the CEO level, not delegated to functional leaders.
Why this matters for founders
Most founders saying 'we are AI-native' are describing a vibe. Lutke described a process. The distinction matters because process is what propagates through an organization. A vibe stays at the all-hands. A performance-review question changes how every manager evaluates every report.
The Shopify memo is also a signal about how public-company CEOs are now willing to be explicit about workforce expectations in ways that would have been considered politically risky two years ago. The fact that Lutke published it himself, on his own X account, indicates he wanted the external signal — to investors, to candidates, to competitors — as much as the internal one.
What this case does not prove
It does not prove the policy is working at Shopify. The company has not published metrics tying the memo to productivity outcomes, and any such metrics would be hard to attribute cleanly. It proves a narrower point: a public-company CEO is now willing to make AI fluency a measurable performance dimension and to say so publicly. Founders building cultures in 2026 should take that as a permission structure, not a template.
The companies that survive the next decade will be the ones whose founders made AI use a non-negotiable expectation early. The companies that did it quietly will be outmaneuvered by the companies that did it explicitly.
Sources for this profile are Tobi Lutke's public X post from April 7, 2025 (the memo itself), and follow-up interviews and statements he has given on the record about Shopify's operating model. All quotes are from the publicly published memo.