Hire an AI Before a Human: Shopify’s Vision for the Future

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1) Things Are Getting Better

2) Hire an AI Before a Human: Shopify’s Vision for the Future

A leaked internal memo from Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke provides a clear and compelling vision for how people should think about AI in the workplace.

Read the original tweet here →

Key takeaways:

• AI Integration is Fundamental: Companies like Shopify now consider AI as core infrastructure. AI isn't just an add-on; it's an essential teammate, reshaping how teams are built, managed, and scaled.

• Prompting and AI Literacy Are Crucial: Prompt engineering—effectively communicating with AI—is now a core business skill, on par with coding. The best employees won't just use AI; they'll master prompting, context creation, and output evaluation.

• Massive Productivity Shift: Businesses adopting an AI-first approach will significantly boost productivity, dramatically increasing the impact per employee. Over the next two years, AI fluency will shift from a nice-to-have to a baseline expectation.

Why It Matters for Your Business

This isn't about the distant future—it's already here. Shopify's memo highlights a seismic shift that every entrepreneur, executive, and innovator needs to understand: Your team's AI literacy will directly correlate with your company's competitiveness.

Start reframing your thinking today:

• "Hire an AI before you hire a human." Prioritize automating with AI first, then fill in gaps with human talent.

• Integrate AI deeply into your core workflows—not as an occasional assistant, but as foundational infrastructure.

• Invest in AI training and education for your team. The companies that adapt early will leap ahead.

3) Predicting the next 5 Years of AI Agents with Nvidia’s AI Chief

In this week’s episode of The Next Wave, Matt Wolfe spoke with NVIDIA’s AI Chief about the future of AI agents. Check it out!

Also, please subscribe to The Next Wave on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. 

4) Sam Altman Confirms: o4 is Coming Sooner Than Expected

In a surprising update, Sam Altman announced a strategic shift at OpenAI: they're releasing intermediate models o3 and o4-mini within weeks, followed by the highly anticipated GPT-5 in just a few months. And, GPT-5 is going to be much better than they originally expected.

What this means for you:
AI innovation driven by all the competition is accelerating faster. We’ll probably see a 3-5x improvement in AI in the next few months, and most people aren’t realizing what that means for their business.

Businesses and creators who anticipate this acceleration and start adapting right now will have a massive competitive advantage in the months ahead.

Be building for where AI is going, not where it is today.

5) Things I’m Learning From

That’s all for today. Please consider sharing the newsletter with your friends if you think they’d enjoy it. 🙏

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-Nathan