Shopify CEO: Reflexive AI Usage
TL;DR:Shopify's reflexive AI mandate is bold but insufficient. Amplifying a single skill with AI won't save you — single-skill jobs are the first to be automated away. The real move is becoming an M-shaped multi-learner with several deep specialisms. AI makes that feasible for the first time in history.
I think by now everyone read the letter from Shopify CEO on “Reflexive AI Usage as a Baseline”?
This reads like a mega-bold statement and very timely. We can now expect a wave of CEO letters to follow. Good. Everyone agrees that AI is something that cannot be ignored if your business aims to keep the market relevancy.
And I want to take this one level higher. Let me explain.
Yesterday I did a talk for our Org Topologies members titled “Versatile”. There I shared a premise that it is not just enough to amplify your current primary skill with AI.
Example: visual design, frontend coding, or alike. Such single-skill jobs will be the first ones to be taken away from humans by AI agents; already starting in 2025.
If we want to stay relevant (a repeated keyword) we need to multi-learn. In other words: become M-shaped professionals with several deep specialisms. Scary? Difficult? Impossible?
“Multi-learning” is not a new topic. For example it was referred to in HBR already in 1986. But it had been vastly seen as a myth and a trait of very rare high-IQ individuals. And fairly so.
But that was before 2025.
Now—is when the history branches off. Embrace versatile multi-learners.
Most who tried AI augmentation at work, realize that the AI facilitates and accelerated learning like nothing else. And the technological progress is still accelerating.
We are entering not just the era of AI and AI augmentation of work.
We are about to witness the rise of multi-learners that are 100x in value they can produce (that’s not some marginal step process improvement).
And on the personal level? What does it mean for all of us?
Our claim: m-shaping is an ultimate solution for staying relevant, preserving our jobs, and on top of that do amazing things for our customers, communities, and the whole world.