Photo: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, recently sent a memo to his staff declaring that AI usage is now a “fundamental expectation” for everyone at the company and that there will be “usage questions” added to peer and performance reviews. He calls out “amazing colleagues” less to emphasize a sense of workplace camaraderie than to call attention to superhuman colleagues, “the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible” and who can now, by using AI tools that have “become 10X themselves,” get “100X the work done.”
If that math sounds like it might raise some questions about Shopify’s overall staffing levels, he got around to that, too. “Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,” he writes. Lutke’s memo is stark and assertive. It portrays a boss becoming more comfortable telling his employees How Things Are and What Must Be Done, at least right up until the part about what happens after everyone makes the effort to “figure out” artificial intelligence: “AI will totally change Shopify, our work, and the rest of our lives. We’re all in on this! I couldn’t think of a better place to be part of this truly unprecedented change than being here.” Cheers!
The memo got instant coverage for its line about head count and went LinkedIn viral for its AI mandate. It also inspired some copycats, among them a dire memo from the CEO of gig-work platform Fiverr, Micha Kaufman, who preemptively shared his warning to employees on X “before it gets out somewhere else.” As a business, Fiverr is extremely exposed to AI tools as they already exist; its platform is full of freelancers offering low-cost translation, illustration, and basic software-development help.
This memo, however, wasn’t about that. It was addressed to and about Fiverr’s corporate staff. “I’ve always believed in radical candor,” Kaufman wrote. “AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it’s coming for my job too. This is a wake-up call.” Where Lutke’s memo merely suggested belt-tightening and heightened expectations, Kaufman’s was more explicit. “Study, research, and master the latest AI solutions in your field,” he wrote. “You are expected and needed to do more, faster, and more efficiently now.” If you don’t use AI, he continued, “your value will decrease before you know what hit you,” and employees need to stop “waiting for the world or your place of work to hand you opportunities to learn and grow.” If you don’t like what he wrote, he said, “I honestly don’t think that a promising professional future awaits you.” Is everyone doomed? “Not all of us, but those who will not wake up and understand the new reality fast, are, unfortunately, doomed.” For now, it’s time to stop “disregard[ing] reality” and to get on the “winning side of history.”
These memos are less notable for what they say than for how they say it, and, perhaps most of all, for what they don’t contain: news about massive restructuring, layoffs, or fundamental changes to business plans.
Granted, announcements along those lines might indeed be coming: There is genuine widespread uncertainty and concern about white-collar AI job displacement, and a wide range of job types could be altered by generative AI. But until they do, these memos are serving more immediate goals. In a small way, they function as ways to let investors know that leadership isn’t behind the curve and won’t miss out on the next big thing. Mostly, though, they’re a way to signal to workers, who are already anxious about AI, that they should be scared about their jobs — and that, in the meantime, they should know their place. (Of course, we in the media are experimenting with AI mandates too.)
AI anxiety is epidemic in the economy, driven both by startling advances in tools that hundreds of millions of people can try for themselves and predictions by industry figures that massive disruptions are imminent. But perhaps nowhere is it as acute or psychologically complicated as in tech itself, where a combination of AI adjacency — the largest tech companies are all investing billions in their own AI tools, and their leaders are among the most bullish on general-purpose AI — and widely used programming assistance tools have created an apocalyptic mood among workers who are coming to believe that they might be the last generation of human software engineers (or at least the last generation for whom writing code is a good job). This, again, might well be true, or true enough to warrant worrying and even changing plans; likewise for warnings by Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg about AI software engineers entering the workforce this year.
That AI might come for coders first was an early fear among generative AI power users, who immediately saw its utility for writing software. For now, however, the predictions haven’t started manifesting in the high-level data, as pointed out by the writer and software engineer Gergely Orosz:
Everywhere on social media: “AI is destroying tech jobs, look at this graph where tech jobs are peaking in 2021 (a year before ChatGPT was even released btw)”
Meanwhile # of open tech jobs at Big Tech, VC-funded startups and scaleups the last 2 years (companies heavily using AI) pic.twitter.com/LN8B7xJFQR
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) May 10, 2025
The chart above explains a great deal, mood-wise. Big tech’s COVID-era hiring spree led to unprecedented staffing levels across the industry, along with a wide range of perks and allowances for remote work. The subsequent contraction started before even early AI coding tools were good enough to significantly affect productivity, and was in fact mostly done by the time ChatGPT debuted in late November of 2022.
The emblematic story of the post-COVID tech industry — Elon Musk’s firing of a majority of the staff at Twitter — took place in the early months of 2023. (Even Musk, who was at the time in the process of founding xAI, and who helped start OpenAI, didn’t attempt to ascribe his cuts there as driven by automation as he later and happily did with DOGE.) Later that year, asked about his own company’s layoffs, Mark Zuckerberg credited Musk for inspiring him and other tech leaders to seek “fewer layers of management” for the coming “year of efficiency.” To the extent this era of layoffs can be connected with AI, it’s through the combination of higher interest rates and a sense of urgency about massive up-front investment in AI, not its early deployment.
Since then, the glutted tech-job market has felt incredibly tight, particularly for early-career workers. Meanwhile, predictions about industrywide automation made by tech leaders have become bolder as AI tools have become more powerful. It’s reasonable to connect the trends and to hunt for evidence of AI displacement in more recent tech layoffs, and I suspect it will soon become easier to find. It’s notable, though, that tech leaders’ rallying cries around AI, despite their confidence in its broad inevitability, have less to say about how and to what ends it should be deployed than about the general need to embrace it.
These AI memos — as well as similar texts from our very own government — should be understood less as examples of candid real talk than as disciplinary messages, or even threats, made by CEOs who are quite happy with the current balance of power in the labor market and who see a possibility, just over the horizon, that it might be sustainable forever: The future is coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Also, we urgently need your help to figure out what that means. For now, sit up straight, return to the office, forget about that raise, and don’t even think about bringing your whole self to work. We can’t replace you with AI yet, but soon we might. In the meantime, don’t give us a reason to try.
