Tobi Lütke
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Sources with Alex Heath · Tobi Lütke on the AI agent revolution and future of Shopify
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Why Is a Paid Shopping Assistant a Breach of Trust?
Tobi Lütke says a shopping assistant that gets paid to choose products is a breach of trust. People want agents that work for them. If the assistant pockets something like air miles for steering the order, that trust is broken. Shopify is in active conversations about more socially acceptable ways to make the connection, because merchants still have to reach the people who will buy.
He does not want AI to pile sales onto the largest companies. Department-store merchandising worked that way: the biggest packaged-goods company got the shelf, and then it got the sales. The internet, and Shopify, broke that pattern, so a product did not have to work for everyone. It could gather a thousand true
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Why Do People Start Shopify Stores on a Lunch Break?
Tobi Lütke says Shopify wants entrepreneurship to be more common and easier to reach, closer to a plan A than only a plan B. The number one moment for starting a business on Shopify is the lunch break in the local time zone. People sign up then to try a career plan they have been thinking about, after a bad meeting, news that someone is losing a job, a friend leaving, or some other dissatisfaction.
They may learn something. They may catch lightning in a bottle if other people want to place orders. Reaching for independence can turn into a business, and it does not have to be a large one. It can be exactly the thing they wanted to have. That is the outcome he wants to see more of.
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Who Should Pay for AI Shopping Agents?
Tobi Lütke is fatalistic about who pays for AI shopping agents. Alex Heath put Shopify's take rate at about 3 percent and asked whether any of it would go to the agents. Tobi Lütke says most of that already goes to the credit card companies, so the margin has to be shared and little is left to fight over or to give away.
He thinks the right move for those startups, if they can get the financing, may be to charge the person using the agent. The agents are of tremendous value. On a reverse test, the money someone would have to be paid to agree they can never use Muse again is going up by the day. A charge depends on how much unique value the product provides, whether it showed up in the right
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What Did Shopify's AI Memo Require?
Tobi Lütke says that once he is convinced something has to happen, he can do what a professional manager hired into the job cannot. He sent a company-wide memo requiring reflexive AI use for everything at Shopify, and he would ask, every time someone needed something from him, how their AI experiment had failed. No committee reviewed the memo before it went out. He is down on committees, and he says it might not have gone out if one had.
The memo drew headlines. Inside Shopify it did not feel controversial. Tobi Lütke says more people paid attention after the press made a big deal of it, including his mom, and that gave him a chance to talk about the AI work already underway. Alex Heath sai
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What Are People Buying Through AI Agents?
Tobi Lütke says people are buying more through AI agents, and the change that matters is the kind of purchase, not the growth rate. Shopify entered the year from a fairly low base, so the percentages look absurd and do not mean much. What is increasing is project-based shopping: a deeply considered order with a fairly high value, such as everything needed to set up a home gym.
The planning can start from a picture of a room or a floor plan. An agent then works out what should be in the space. He describes a weekend project with his kids and a 3D printer, using magnets, filament, and a little electronics. The agent figures out the parts and places the order from local stores so everything is
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What Is the Claw Agent Tobi Lütke Runs at Home?
Tobi Lütke runs a completely local Claw in his house, on a rack like the one Lulu and Christian built, with one of Dell's GB300s inside, and the rack is fully training models. As a public company CEO, sending agent work out to a lab is harder because lots of things cannot be sent there, so the work runs local. The rack also holds the historical corpus of Shopify.
He is an atoms minimalist and a digital archiving maximalist. He has everything he wrote and lots of logs, and he knows what he has done on his computer for the last 15 years. Given the last 20 years, a lot about him is already in the pre-trains, so agents already know about him and his experience using them is close to ideal.
Whe
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Why Does a Company Have to Be Too Good to Ignore?
Tobi Lütke says a successful company has to be too good to ignore, and a fantastical career comes from skills and aptitudes that make a person too good to ignore. The standard is the best advice anyone can have. The company also has to be so important to people that it is deserving of a value.
The same bar applies when a product competes for the limited resources people already spend. The example, offered with some uncertainty about the exact trade, is someone stopping the extra cup at Starbucks once a month so they can afford the product. In the West, a consumer company is really competing with spending on coffee. Enterprise buying is different. Alex Heath, pricing a newsletter a year ago
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Why Is Europe More Cynical About AI Than America?
Tobi Lütke says Europe is more cynical about AI than America, not simply more negative, because people there still reason from an early ChatGPT install while America keeps adopting early.
Business formation is up, and attitudes toward AI lead in the United States. Other parts of the Western world sit on an early incline of America's slope, and the old societal stereotypes show up in the data. Time spent in Europe recently sharpened the contrast: the mood is more cynical, and definitely German. Waiting until technology proves itself is fair for a country to choose. In conversation, people say they understand AI because they installed ChatGPT when it came out and it hallucinates a lot. Five m
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Are More Shopify Stores Opening Than Ever?
Tobi Lütke says more Shopify storefronts are being opened now than ever, and the curve is going really, really well. The people opening them are younger. The new generation is extremely entrepreneurial.
The pattern combines AI use with the media young people already watch. Parents in every generation malign the media consumption of the next generation, and the complaints come with no break. He does not know how often Mr. Beast got banned in various households, and he is not sure that was the right call, because the channel is clearly entertainment and very, very entrepreneurial by itself.
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What Does Tobi Lütke Think About AI Risk?
Tobi Lütke thinks the positive effects of AI are going to be vastly higher than the negative effects, and his PDOOM is zero.
One core myth Western civilization is built on is the Promethean myth. Prometheus brought fire from Mount Olympus to humans, got the whole party going, and was doomed to torture forever. The myth casts a more powerful spell than people generally admit, leaving a strong sense that everything good has negative consequences of equal proportion. AI is potentially the most powerful thing humans will ever invent, or definitely one of the top few, so it is a lever for really good and really bad uses. On an individual level it will have an enormous positive influence on some
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Why Does Pessimism Lead to Zero-sum Thinking?
Tobi Lütke says pessimism leads to zero-sum thinking because, once pessimism counts as sophisticated, people take fewer opportunities, growth fades, and appreciation of opportunity fades, so the strategy becomes competing for what already exists.
Humans need a frontier and work best when opportunity is present. Without a frontier or enough perceived growth, competing for what already exists is the correct strategy. An environment where zero-sum thinking predominates feels entirely different from one where positive-sum thinking predominates and people go for new markets and new ideas. The gap is the biggest difference imaginable, and the two sit far apart on a very long spectrum. Joining a s
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Why Does Selling in More Places Make Shopify More Valuable?
Tobi Lütke says Shopify is known for online stores, but merchants use it in many other situations, and Shopify becomes more valuable the more places people sell their products.
Shopify is a way to sell. The online store is the home base and the easiest thing to see: merchants control it, design it, represent themselves, and do their storytelling. Most people probably purchase things on Shopify through an Instagram ad. People also sell through social channels, through a point of sale, and at craft fairs.
Shopify is presiding over the most interesting product catalog on planet Earth because most new businesses have a Shopify store and often start on Shopify, from the best fashion designers t
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Why Did Shopify and Amazon Split on Muse?
Tobi Lütke says Shopify and Amazon split on Muse because they have spent 20 years on different ideas of commerce, not because one of them is simply right. He learned Amazon had blocked Muse only after Shopify posted that it was embracing Muse. He found that order fun, and the post looked cheeky. Muse struck him as a remarkable product, and the public reaction was surprise that the two companies landed on opposite sides.
One approach is the digitalization of a department store. It brings the merchandiser forward as an everything store: one place where a shopper gets everything. He treats that and Shopify's approach as two long-running positions, not a right answer and a wrong one.