Shopify workers are expected to use Gen AI in their workplaces. Is your job next?
Most of us receive the same basic questions in employee performance reviews, even if we do completely different jobs. What did you achieve last year? What opportunities are there for improvement? But here’s what you may not have seen before: How did you use it? Generation AI At work?
Something like that question might be in the next performance review of at least one employer. in Notes posted online After leaking Reported by CNBC Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke said using AI in the workplace is no longer an option for e-commerce software companies that employed around 8,100 people at the end of 2024.
“Using AI effectively has become a fundamental expectation for everyone at Shopify,” Lutke wrote in a note.
Gen AI tools like Openai chatgpt And Google’s Gemini It is increasingly being promoted as an office game changer, with business leaders saying it can make employees more efficient. At the same time, the transformation raises concerns that these tools will replace humans, reducing work. A recent Pew Research Center survey found 64% American adults who predicted that AI growth would lead to a decline in jobs.
Shopify is one of the companies that emphasize AI generals in the workplace, but that’s not the only one. What happens when your boss adds “Use AI” to his job responsibilities?
Does AI at work have less work?
Lutke’s notes highlighted the importance of Shopify employees tinkering with AI and spelled out specific requirements, including sharing what they learned about using AI tools. He also said that before the team seeks more resources, they need to show why AI can’t meet their needs or hire new employees.
This memo clearly illustrates one of the potential impacts Gen AI has on employment availability. If AI can do the work instead, companies are less willing to hire.
That fear is widely shared More Americans are worried than they have hopes about the impact of AI on their jobsanother Pew survey released in February focuses on Americans’ thoughts on AI in the workplace.
Despite widespread fear, Nicole Sahin, CEO and founder of global employment and affiliated company GP, said he is still looking at companies hiring workers in line with what is expected in the growing labor market.
“Companies definitely hire people and can’t find enough talent,” she said. “I don’t feel that employment is slowing down.”
What’s probably changing is that people who are employed in the kind of jobs that can be done with Gen AI tools are employed based on their ability to be creative and multipurpose with their technology, Sahin said.
If AI is an expectation at work
Shopify’s notes and expectations regarding AI use are “a new normal beginning,” Sahin said. GP announced this week’s survey Over 3,000 Global Executives and HR Experts91% of management report that companies are expanding their AI initiatives.
Sahin said the issue is that businesses expect workers to experiment with technology and become creative. “The willingness to be agile is very important,” she said.
Experts say the growing use of Gen AI in the workplace is changing the skills employees need to thrive. Many workers, including entry-level positions, are Rely more on subject expertise and judgment Instead of a skill that performs tasks that can be performed with AI tools instead.
Most workers in the Pew survey in February said they don’t use AI chatbots at all or rarely use them, and only 16% reported using AI at work.
Even young workers generally do not use AI at work. Gallup survey released this week We asked Gen Z adults about using Gen AI at work. Only 30% said they used it for work, and over half said they didn’t have a formal AI policy in their workplace. In the survey, 29% said AI is not present in the job, and 36% said risk outweighed the benefits of the job.
Just because you can or can use AI in the workplace doesn’t mean it’s worth it. A report by consulting firm Coastal this month, half of the business leaders surveyed said they saw it There is no measurable return on investment from AIand only 21% reported proven results. Coast believes this gap between hype and outcomes is attributed to the cutting between experiments and strategies.
“In the absence of clear business integrity or defined outcomes, AI risks staying in the ‘interesting but isolated’ category,” the coastal report said.
AI problems at work
GEN AI systems like ChatGPT may be able to generate answers to various queries, but they don’t answer them the same way as humans do. For one thing, they tend to do Errors known as hallucinations – Instead of admitting that they don’t know the answer, they essentially make things.
It makes it essential Use AI wisely And don’t trust the answer, as always, as it’s the right thing to do. Especially large popular language models like ChatGpt are trained with a huge amount of data, but not everything is suitable for your job, and not everything.
These types of models “should not be used in practice for work,” Sahin said. “When you’re thinking about using AI in your business, you can’t hallucinate and you can’t be wrong.”
At work, you need specialized tools that are less likely to hallucinate and are easy to verify and correct, she said. Workers need to be able to detect and fix these issues in order to use AI more frequently.
Learning these skills is just part of the job right now at Shopify, Lutke writes. “Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skills to apply AI in your craft. You should give it a try.