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JP Poma was hired by Shopify in January with a mandate to inject its go-to-market teams with AI.
Seven months later, while the director of GTM initiatives’s team still resembles a traditional sales org—replete with SDRs, account executives, solutions engineers, and customer success managers—the way the team operates (how it uses insights and data, for example) is now more precise because of AI.
Poma and Shopify are pushing for tech to do everything from removing administrative tasks to synthesizing data for better decision-making. Shopify envisions a future where sales teams only have to do client-facing work—the rest will be handled by AI.
Reinventing go-to-market
Poma is reinventing the GTM process to speed up how his teams are informed about clients.
To achieve this, Shopify created a “labs team” that uses AI to test hyperspecific solutions and discuss how, or if, to scale those solutions across teams. The team of three tests and builds solutions where “the impact radius is tiny” Poma said, meaning what might be right for, say, a GTM staffer might not be right for, say, an SDR.
“Now, if we have the right infrastructure in place, it’s almost like the exhaust of running the business because of what AI makes possible,” Poma said. “You take this work that used to be so high effort just to get to a reasonable baseline. Now you can exceed that baseline and have almost perfect information heading into every stage. It just helps us be even more merchant-centric.”
According to Ryan Longfield, head of global commercial operations, Shopify’s AI use has spiked inbound lead conversion rates by 83% and reduced spam rates in the same category by 54%.
Developing revenue specific tools
Shopify was struggling to find AI tools that could export data, Longfield told us. So it did what any entrepreneurial company would do: build its own.
The company’s proprietary AI tool has an internal tech stack that revenue professionals can use to create enterprise-grade solutions. On top of its own AI tool, Shopify also integrates with Salesloft and Salesforce.
Outbound approaches are one aspect of the work that has been reshaped using AI.
“What we’ve always wanted to do was have the scale of a marketing engine, but the customization of an SDR,” Longfield said. “We’ve built a pretty cool agent that will grab internal and external data, depending upon if it’s a customer or prospect, and then it will have all of the structure of our most effective emails.”
Beyond outbound, Longfield said using AI minimizes meeting prep, enriches merchant data, creating more precise GTM decisions, and has increased accuracy of line-of-business classification by 25%. However, Longfield said using AI in this way is only possible because of employee buy-in, which he said has created a “source code” for finding efficiencies.
Longfield said the more foundational information that can be input into AI tools, in-house or external, like Cursor or Gumloop, the better they will become at finding efficiencies and solving complex, job-specific problems. In his view, it is essential to create AI tools that can communicate with each other and ensure that the data is being used across teams.
This comes as a result of leadership’s push into AI. In April, the company’s CEO, Tobias Lütke, posted a memo whose TL;DR was: AI or bust. Laying out a vision of the future where AI is baked into all aspects of the company, including revenue, Lütke wrote: “Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify.”
Retail Brew reported in May that Shopify was using AI to reduce costs of running e-commerce businesses during times of economic uncertainty.
“We’re already in a post-AI version of Shopify,” Vanessa Lee, VP of product who oversees Shopifyʼs AI efforts, told Retail Brew. “AI should be infused in every part of the merchant journey not just at the beginning, and not just for people who are just getting started.”
The emergence of vibe-coding
Within the Shopify walls, executives bandy the phrase “vibe-coding,” which refers to the practice of using coding tools, like Cursor or Gumloop, to create AI models for hyperspecific job functions, as if their lives depended on it.
Bobby Morrison, Shopify’s chief revenue officer, said that ahead of the company’s quarterly “Hack Days,” a 48-hour window dedicated to coding, the company saw over 700 Cursor and over 500 Gumloop downloads. On Morrison’s revenue team, 2,000 of his 3,000 employees spent the window vibe-coding—or using AI to complete administrative tasks.
Morrison said this emphasis on technical capabilities could mean AI coding will be essential to any revenue organization.
“I’ve asked my team to be builders, meaning, if you have something in your role, that you believe AI could come along and help you automate, then I’m going to ask you to build your own personal [AI] exoskeleton,” Morrison said.