{"id":603906,"date":"2026-09-18T03:44:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T03:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/603906\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T03:44:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T03:44:15","slug":"shopify-ceo-ai-slop-grenades-can-make-work-harder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/603906\/","title":{"rendered":"Shopify CEO: AI ‘Slop Grenades’ Can Make Work Harder"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI makes tech jobs easier<\/a>. Right?<\/p>\n

Not always, Shopify CEO Tobias L\u00fctke said during an interview on “The Knowledge Project” podcast, released on Tuesday. His take: AI helps employees produce more material, more quickly \u2014 without taking responsibility for whether it is useful or correct.<\/p>\n

“We call those ‘slop grenades’ that people toss at each other,” he said. “And that’s definitely a bad thing.”<\/p>\n

The problem, he said, is that the tools make it easy to pass along work that has not been properly evaluated.<\/p>\n

He offered an example: Someone might send an unnecessarily long AI-written email, forcing its recipient to use another large language model to summarize it.<\/p>\n

“Why did we invent decompression and recompression?” he said. “This is terrible.”<\/p>\n

Shopify has aggressively embraced AI<\/a>. The e-commerce platform has rolled out AI tools for agents. Internally, L\u00fctke said it’s internal agent, River, handles a large share \u2014 possibly as much as half \u2014 of the company’s production code pull requests.<\/p>\n

L\u00fctke said AI is most valuable when it makes people’s thinking clearer and more concise. The tech is least valuable when it’s adding slop to a coworker’s desk.<\/p>\n

“Humans take responsibility,” he said. “Machines can help us take more responsibility because they can inform us better.”<\/p>\n

Shopify didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI makes tech jobs easier. Right? Not always, Shopify CEO Tobias L\u00fctke said during an interview on “The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[6116,365,363,364,2038,1656,21138,9948,297583,111,139,69,384,297584,83752,297581,297582,199,220896,145,4576],"class_list":["post-603906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-agent","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business-insider","tag-company","tag-desk","tag-employee","tag-lutke","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-people","tag-production-code-pull-request","tag-responsibility","tag-shopify-ceo","tag-slop-grenade","tag-take","tag-tech-job","tag-technology","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}