GenAI’s Bezos Mandate? Shopify Just Issued It

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke just made AI fluency a baseline expectation for every employee. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this movie before back when Amazon issued their API mandate.

In 2011, an internal rant by Amazon engineer Steve Yegge escaped into the wild. It was sprawling, messy, and unforgettable. At its heart was a single idea: Jeff Bezos had ordered every team at Amazon to turn their work into a service; something other teams could use as a product. No private interfaces. No shortcuts. Everything had to be treated like a public API.

The memo became a turning point. It reframed how companies thought about platforms. And not just as technical infrastructure, but as a way of working.

Now, over a decade later, Shopify may have delivered GenAI’s version of that moment.

Enter Reflexive AI

In a memo shared publicly this week, CEO Tobi Lütke makes the message plain: "reflexive AI use is no longer optional—it’s expected." Not eventually. Now.

“Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify.”

This isn’t about tools. It’s about behavior. Every project begins with AI. Every prototype should be AI-augmented. Performance reviews will assess AI fluency. And before you ask for more resources, you’re expected to show why an autonomous agent couldn’t handle it first.

If the Yegge memo introduced Bezos' idea that organizations had to become understandable to one another through the interface alone, Lütke’s memo suggests we now need understanding at the tool level. According to Lutke, people need to start thinking in a way that invites collaboration not just across teams, but across services themselves.

It’s a shift from platform thinking to augmentation thinking; from exposing our work to target teams to explosing our work to target machines. If a machine can't figure it out alone, then your work doesn't count.

“Stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.”

But (and there's always a "but...") there’s a caution here, too.

AI fluency requires more than enthusiasm

The Yegge memo led many companies to adopt the surface features of APIS and platform strategy without its underlying discipline. They changed their architecture, renamed their org charts, launched internal APIs and ended up tangled in complexity they weren’t ready for. The results weren’t always transformative. Sometimes they were just messy. And almost always, they were costly.

The same risk exists now in this genAI moment.

AI is not a panacea. It’s leverage. And leverage, mishandled, doesn’t just fail, it amplifies our blind spots and magnifies our mistakes. Without care, the drive -- the **reflex** -- to "use AI everywhere" can turn into noise, confusion, and shallow implementation. AI fluency requires more than enthusiasm. It requires learning, context, meaningful feedback, and a clear sense of purpose.

What Lütke’s memo gets right is that this change isn’t coming, it’s already here. The companies that treat AI as a fundamental shift in how people think and work together will pull ahead. The ones that treat it like just another dashboard button will fall behind, even if they look busy.

So yes, this feels like a moment. A generational one.

GenAI just got its Bezos Mandate.

And Shopify didn’t wait around; they've already started.