A pair of tech CEOs separately told their workers last week to use artificial intelligence tools before asking for more people for their teams — potentially signaling the state of hiring and management in the sector amid 2025’s uncertainty.
Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, posted a memo to X that he sent to employees, in which he outlined a number of shifts to how the company will approach both AI and people management.
“Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,” the memo read.
Lutke also said that AI usage is now a “fundamental expectation” of those working at the company, and that Shopify will add AI usage questions to its performance review questionnaire: “Learning to prompt and load context is important, and getting peers to provide feedback on how this is going will be valuable.”
Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman also released an internal memo hours prior directing the future of the company’s approach to AI, according to an email sent to HR Dive.
“It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person — AI is coming for you,” the Fiverr memo read.
Kaufman went on to discuss the kinds of changes AI may make in a company, including the looming threat of career change for those who do not become “exceptional.”
“I am not trying to scare you. I am not talking about your job at Fiverr. I am talking about your ability to stay in your profession in the industry,” the memo said.
Kaufman’s memo also discusses hiring in a field where AI has taken off.
“Get involved in making the organization more efficient using AI tools and technologies. It does not make sense to hire more people before we learn how to do more with what we have,” he said.
Both memos speak to a number of coalescing trends, including the cost of AI talent, rising uncertainty in the talent market and the flat growth of the tech industry amid generative AI’s explosion.
AI skills may earn workers stronger wage premiums than degrees, one Oxford Internet Institute study said. And employers have tended to hire for AI talent rather than develop internally, a General Assembly report said, leading companies to hire AI talent too quickly (and expensively) without establishing any enduring pipeline.
Meanwhile, layoffs have hit the tech industry hard; in August 2024, tech companies announced the highest number of job cuts in 20 months, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas — with many of those cuts related to adopting AI and automation, the report said.
A Burning Glass Institute and SHRM report from 2024 also pointed to the potential “high human cost” of generative AI adoption, particularly in the finance and insurance, professional services and information services industries.
Reskilling is a consistent theme across these reports — but getting employees to take that training may be an ongoing struggle. According to a Pew Research Center report released in February 2025, only 12.2% of respondents said they received training on the use of AI tools in the past year.
However, HR has yet to make AI training a priority, a Conference Board report said in January. Only 7% of CHROs surveyed said they are implementing reskilling strategies for jobs with a high probability of having tasks taken over by AI, indicating room for learning growth at various organizations.
