Shopify CEO says employees' 'slop grenades' are making more work for everyone else

Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke is sounding less enchanted by AI than he did last year. Back then, he told employees AI use was a “baseline expectation” and said they should prove they couldn’t get something done with AI before asking for more resources. Now he’s warning that the same tools are being used to push unexamined emails and code onto coworkers.

On The Knowledge Project podcast on Tuesday, Lütke said Shopify workers are tossing around what he called “slop grenades.” The phrase is blunt, and the complaint behind it is even blunter: AI can make it easy to produce work that looks finished without actually being finished. A long email, he said, can turn into “a big missive” that nobody really reads, only for colleagues to spend time spotting what’s off.

He’s not alone in the retreat. Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn also toned down his earlier AI-first message. After saying the company would evaluate employees on AI usage and only add headcount if a team couldn’t automate the work, he later told Fast Company he had gotten carried away by how well AI demoed in writing. At scale, he said, it still doesn’t match the creativity of Duolingo’s people.

Researchers have a name for the broader problem: “workslop.” BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab surveyed 962 American full-time desk workers this year and found 52.7% said they had sent it to colleagues. More than a third said they had received it, and they estimated it took 3.4 hours a month to clean up. The survey also found people thought less of colleagues who sent workslop, and 36% of recipients said they wanted to avoid working with those people in the future.