Your CEO Just Said ‘Use AI or Else.’ Here’s What to Do Next.

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A company memo went viral this week, but not because it leaked. It didn’t have to.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke posted an internal message—which laid out new expectations for AI use among Shopify employees—publicly on X. The memo, which urged employees to integrate AI into their daily work, use it during early prototyping, and treat it as a core job skill, quickly spread through tech and AI circles. The headline takeaway? “Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify.”

Translation: If you’re not using AI as part of your everyday work, you’re already behind.

As the lead at Every Consulting, I talk to prospective clients every day about how they can make the best use of AI. Lutke’s memo reflects many of the challenges and opportunities I see teams grappling with. Executives want AI adoption but struggle to differentiate value from noise, managers are unsure how to evaluate AI-powered work, and individual contributors feel paralyzed by the gap between AI's potential and their current comfort level.

Shopify is in the middle of a company-wide training montage. Everyone is. Some are further along. Some are just starting. Even the people most excited about this shift—your CEO included—are figuring out what good usage looks like in real time. Lutke admits as much in the memo: He uses AI constantly but still feels like he’s “only scratching the surface.”

This five-step guide is for anyone trying to understand what Shopify’s new AI expectations mean in practice. What does “reflexive AI usage” look like? How do you go from feeling behind to feeling fluent? Most importantly, how do you make AI work for you—without it feeling like more work?

Let’s dive in.

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