Tobi Lütke recently shared Shopify’s internal memo setting the baseline expectation for AI usage across their company.

If you think back a few decades, organizations began expecting employees to use desktop computers by default. Then it was Microsoft Office. Then it was the internet. Employees who adopted these tools early were seen as far more efficient and effective than those who lagged behind.

Now, circa 2025, that same moment has arrived for AI.

Beyond just using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity to write emails or draft business documents—or using Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, or Aider to code—employees looking for jobs today are expected to use AI tools relevant to their field by default. Those who don’t will be viewed much like someone applying for a finance job without ever using a spreadsheet, or a marketer unfamiliar presenting with powerpoints.

AI must become part of how you work, build, and what you deliver to customers.
In fact, AI already touches our lives a lot more often than we realize: from Google Maps to YouTube’s algorithms to social media feeds to even our weather forecast. Just as human jaws and airways have shrunk and deformed over generations due to eating softer foods, our brains, too, may evolve—or de-evolve—with how AI is changing how we learn, think, create, and live. (A topic for another day)

At work, the default expectation now has become:

• You know and use AI tools to do your job 10x-100x better faster cheaper
• What we deliver to customers is by default, turbo-charged by AI
• Productivity improvements come more from AI—far more than adding headcount

Y Combinator‘s most recent cohort of engineer-founders is shipping 279% more than prior cohorts because of AI. Gemini 2.5 recently ranked 6th out of 93 students in a top university’s computer science midterm exam according to the professor. Meanwhile, ChatGPT 4.5 reliably passed the Turing test 73% of the time.

As AI becomes just as smart—if not smarter—than humans in almost all knowledge work, workers must learn how to use AI, where to use it, when to use it, and which AI tools to use for different tasks in order to survive and thrive.

Soon, nearly all work done digitally will either be better with AI—or fully replaced by AI. This includes senior executive roles, and yes, even CEOs. Any job that doesn’t require face-to-face customer interaction will likely be replaced or transformed. Our jobs might not be fully replaced by AI, but they will certainly be replaced by people who use AI.

So, before asking for more headcount or resources, the burden is on us to prove why the work cannot be done using AI. (And it can not be because “AI isn’t good enough yet” as it’s becoming increasingly clear that AI is far more capable already than most people assume.)

AI’s impact is both horizontal and vertical. It’s very wide and it’s very deep. Every knowledge worker will be affected in the next 3-5 years.

The future is already here—and it’s quickly becoming evenly distributed.