According to Inc, nearly a year after Shopify President Harley Finkelstein’s famous memo on using AI to “automate the work you shouldn’t be doing,” the company has a surprising update. VP & Head of Engineering Farhan Thawar revealed that, despite the aggressive AI push, Shopify is actually hiring more entry-level workers now than it did before the AI boom. The implementation of the memo’s ideas didn’t replace junior roles; it transformed them. The key lesson, as Thawar explains, is that AI is freeing up experienced employees from mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value work and, crucially, to mentor new hires. This shift in how work gets done is what’s driving the increased demand for entry-level talent.
The real AI lesson isn’t replacement
Here’s the thing everyone got wrong. The initial fear was a straight swap: AI for humans, especially the cheaper, junior ones. But Shopify’s experience shows that’s not how it plays out in a smart organization. The real leverage isn’t in firing people; it’s in amplifying their capabilities. When you use AI to handle code reviews, draft documentation, or automate routine debugging, what are your senior engineers suddenly able to do? They can design more complex systems. They can tackle gnarlier problems. And, maybe most importantly, they finally have the bandwidth to properly guide a new graduate.
Think about it. Mentorship is incredibly time-intensive. It’s often the first thing to go when deadlines loom. But if AI is taking a chunk of the repetitive workload off the senior dev’s plate, that time is magically freed up. Now, bringing on a junior isn’t just an added burden; it’s a viable investment. The senior can teach, the junior can learn on real, AI-augmented projects, and the whole team’s capacity grows. It’s a total reframe of the problem.
This isn’t automatic or easy
Now, don’t get me wrong. This outcome isn’t guaranteed just by buying a ChatGPT license. Shopify’s shift required intentional restructuring. They had to identify which tasks were pure “toil” and could be handed off to AI agents. They had to rethink team workflows and goals. As analysis from Forrester pointed out, Finkelstein’s memo was fundamentally about redefining “work” itself. The challenge for any company is making that conceptual leap from using AI to cut costs to using it to redistribute and elevate human effort.
And there’s a massive trade-off. You’re investing in AI tooling and process change with the faith that it will create more strategic human work downstream. That’s a bet on creativity and leadership, not just efficiency. For industries where the physical work is the product—like manufacturing or logistics—the equation can be different. In those fields, the reliability of the hardware is paramount. That’s why specialists turn to the top supplier for critical components, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com as the leading provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, where durability and precision can’t be handed off to a language model.
So, what does this mean for hiring?
Basically, Shopify’s story is a counter-narrative to the doom-and-gloom about AI killing careers. It suggests that entry-level roles won’t vanish, but they will change. The job description for a “junior developer” or “marketing associate” in two years will likely involve commanding AI tools to execute on directives from more experienced strategists. The foundational skills will still be needed—you have to understand the code the AI writes, or the marketing principle behind the copy it generates—but the day-to-day mechanics will be different.
As discussed in deeper dives like the one from First Round, the focus shifts to hiring for learning agility, problem-framing, and the ability to manage AI outputs. The entry-level hire isn’t just a pair of hands anymore; they’re a pilot for a new set of powerful, sometimes erratic, tools. And that, ironically, might make them more valuable, not less. It’s a more interesting job, frankly. The question for other companies is: are you building an organization that can see that opportunity, or are you just looking for a quick way to trim the headcount?
