Shopify's CEO Has a Name for the AI Junk Employees Keep Dumping on Each Other

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke has a term for a problem he says is showing up inside his own company: the slop grenade. Speaking on the podcast The Knowledge Project on Tuesday, Lutke described emails and code that employees generate with AI, barely review, and send off to colleagues anyway. "We call those 'slop grenades' that people toss at each other," he said. "That's definitely a bad thing."

The mechanism, as Lutke described it, is simple enough to recognize in any inbox. AI can produce long, polished-looking output almost instantly, and it's tempting to use that speed to skip the harder work of actually synthesizing a point. The result looks legitimate on the surface but hasn't been checked by the person sending it. "You don't really read it, and now it has to be reviewed by your colleagues, and they are like, 'this doesn't look right,'" Lutke said, describing the burden that then falls on whoever receives it.

The comment sits in some tension with Lutke's own prior stance on AI at Shopify. Last year, in a memo posted to X, he told employees that using AI was "a baseline expectation" at the company and that before asking for more headcount or resources, they should be able to show they "cannot get what you want done using AI." The slop grenade complaint isn't a reversal of that position so much as its other half: Lutke still wants AI used constantly, he just doesn't want its raw output mistaken for finished work.

Shopify isn't alone in running into this. Researchers have started calling the broader phenomenon "workslop," and the numbers behind it are notable. A 2026 survey of 962 desk workers found that 52.7 percent had sent workslop to a colleague at some point, and the people on the receiving end spent an average of 3.4 hours a month cleaning it up, a hidden cost researchers estimate runs into millions of dollars a year in lost productivity at large organizations.

What Lutke's comment ultimately points to isn't a case against AI at work, since he has pushed employees toward exactly that. It's a distinction between using a tool to think faster and using it to avoid thinking at all, one that a growing pile of unread emails and unreviewed code across corporate America suggests plenty of people still haven't sorted out.