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

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

Shopify’s CEO has emphasized the importance of using AI at work, making it a key skill for employees. To effectively integrate AI, employees should start using it regularly, understand their value, and document their processes to improve efficiency. Sharing experiences and workflows with teammates can foster collaboration and innovation in an AI-driven environment.

Key Takeaways:

1. Begin using AI tools in your daily tasks to develop comfort and proficiency.
2. Identify what aspects of your work are valuable and how AI can enhance them.
3. Document your processes and share your learnings with colleagues to encourage collective growth.

Highlights from Article

The goal is to build a habit—a reflex—to include AI in your process.

Step 1: Start using AI now

This is where a lot of people get tripped up. They open a new AI tool and ask, “What can you do?” Instead, start with: “What do I do that matters—to me and to my team?”

How could AI help me do this faster, better, or in a different way than I could have before? Generic AI usage leads to generic results.

The people who get the most out of it aren’t technical wizards. It’s the clear communicators, managers, and leaders who know how to give good instructions and learn from results. AI thrives on clarity. It needs structure to do its best work. That structure comes from the context you give it: the way you outline your workflows, capture your steps, and define what “done” looks like.

What makes a good customer response? What makes a good product feature? What makes a good strategy document? These aren’t universal constants. They’re shaped by you, your company’s values, your team’s needs, and your customers' expectations. AI can help you get there faster, but you need to know where “there” is.  You can capture that context and those expectations in whatever system you normally work

• Decide what good is

Good documentation turns one-off experiments into repeatable processes, and repeatable processes into opportunities for automation.

For example, I’ve seen clients take their prompts—meticulously crafted to turn news or research papers into key information—and empower a bot that dutifully combs through defined sources before delivering a report to their email each day.  This is where things start to shift from helpful to high-leverage. Once you notice you’re doing something more than once—and it’s working—you’re not just experimenting anymore. You’re building, which is exactly the shift Lütke is pushing for at Shopify. When he says he wants employees to “prototype” with it, what he’s saying is that he wants you to find the leverage points in your day-to-day work and systematize them. Block one hour this week to review how you’ve used AI in the past month and ask yourself:

What have I used AI for more than once? What worked especially well? What took less time than it used to?

common failure mode is experimenting without documenting—you close your chat window before capturing the prompt that worked or the output that was just right. It just takes one more message to ChatGPT to ask it to turn your conversation into a template.

These show-and-tell sessions create vital bridges: The people closest to the problems can explain their needs and solutions, while technical teams can identify opportunities to automate and scale what’s working.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

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