Tobias Lütke on AI
From The Era of the Entrepreneur — Tobi Lütke (Shopify) & Lulu Cheng Meservey (Rostra) · · Toronto Tech Week
“The shape of companies is going to change. Absolutely. Companies will be smaller. And but there will be vastly more of them which is amazing because like I think the world's actually deeply impoverished in terms of how incredible the products are and what we can what we can get by the fact that like there's only very few companies that could actually pay or create the environments for having excellent engineering and engineering was the core ingredient of all the most important well most of the most important projects and companies of the last 20 years, but like there's just not enough engineers in the world to come up like to to follow everyone's ideas. And and now this is becoming much more like like everyone has a seven out of 10 engineer on their phone right now for $200 a month and and that'll be 20 or $2 a month very soon.”
On , Tobias Lütke, Chief Executive Officer at Shopify, spoke about AI during The Era of the Entrepreneur — Tobi Lütke (Shopify) & Lulu Cheng Meservey (Rostra) on Toronto Tech Week.
About Tobias Lütke
Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, has been active in public discussions about the impact of artificial intelligence on entrepreneurship and company structure. In a May 2026 fireside chat, he argued that "we don't have a jobs shortage coming, we have a companies shortage," stating that engineering is no longer scarce and that individuals can now act as "the CEO of a data center of agents." He suggested that a billion-dollar one-person company may already exist. On a podcast in March 2026, Lütke said that people are "overestimating the founders of companies" and "massively underestimating what you can do when the founder is still present and in charge." He also described the "killer feature" of early Shopify as its aesthetic appeal, saying it "looked beautiful" and "tamed the complexity of starting a real business." Lütke has also discussed Shopify's development of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which he described in a May 2026 conversation as an attempt to "retain the variety of the bazaar" in commerce. He characterized protocol design as "the highest form of software engineering." In a separate interview, Lütke stated that "every existing piece of software on planet Earth is now just a prompt for a better version," and that companies will become smaller but more numerous. He also commented on corporate layoffs, saying that "what you see right now is not AI layoffs" but rather companies that "overhire just like everyone else," and that AI is being used as a "scapegoat." During Shopify's Q1 2026 earnings call, Lütke reported that weekly active users of the company's AI assistant, Sidekick, had increased 385% year-over-year.