Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke says AI is not automatically making work easier.
In an interview on 'The Knowledge Project' podcast released Tuesday, Lütke said AI helps employees produce more material, more quickly, but often without taking responsibility for whether it is useful or correct. He called those outputs 'slop grenades' that people toss at each other.
'And that's definitely a bad thing,' he said.
Lütke's point is simple: tools that make it easy to pass along unfinished work can create more work for everyone else. He gave one example of an unnecessarily long AI-written email that would force the recipient to use another large language model just to summarize it. 'Why did we invent decompression and recompression?' he said. 'This is terrible.'
Shopify has embraced AI aggressively. The e-commerce platform has rolled out AI tools for agents, and Lütke said the company's internal agent, River, handles a large share — possibly as much as half — of Shopify's production code pull requests.
Even so, Lütke drew a line between speed and value. He said AI is most useful when it makes people's thinking clearer and more concise. It is least useful when it adds slop to a coworker's desk.
'Humans take responsibility,' he said. 'Machines can help us take more responsibility because they can inform us better.'
For founders, the lesson is not to chase AI output for its own sake. The math is simple: more volume does not mean more value if your team spends the next hour cleaning up the mess. The right playbook is to use AI to tighten thinking, shorten drafts, and reduce friction — not to dump unresolved work onto the next person in the pipeline.
That matters because every 'slop grenade' taxes attention, slows execution, and raises the cost of coordination. The companies that win with AI will not be the ones that produce the most content. They will be the ones that preserve accountability and keep margins on time and focus.
