AI-first is a preference order, and a preference order is a rule for one decision: try the machine before the person. It says nothing about the decisions that follow. Which work the machine may do unsupervised, which it may only draft, who checks it, who answers when it is wrong, and what the people still on the payroll must stay capable of doing. In April 2025 two chief executives declared AI-first within three weeks of each other. One published his memo and held the line. The other walked it back in a month, on LinkedIn, after his customers turned on him. The difference between the two is not courage. It is that one of them had written down what the phrase committed the company to and the other had not.
The answer, in one line
Not on its own. AI-first is a preference order: try the machine before the person. A strategy says which decisions the machine may inform, recommend or execute, which stay human, who is accountable for each, and what the organisation's people must remain capable of.
What the two memos said#
Tobi Lütke posted Shopify's internal memo on X on 7 April 2025 after it leaked. The sentence everybody quoted: 'Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.' The sentence fewer people quoted was the question he wanted every team to ask: 'What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?' That is a design question, and an answerable one. It asks the team to describe the work, not to describe the tool.
Luis von Ahn told Duolingo staff in late April that the company would 'gradually stop using contractors to do work AI can handle', that AI use would count in performance reviews, and that headcount would be added only 'if a team cannot automate more of their work'. The backlash was public and fast, on the app's own social channels. On 23 May he wrote on LinkedIn: 'I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire)' and 'I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality.' A month from replacement to acceleration, with no change in the technology in between.
What AI-first decides, and what it does not#
Read as a rule, AI-first decides exactly one thing: the order in which options are considered. It does not decide the boundary, which is the list of decisions the machine may inform, recommend or execute, and the ones it may never own. It does not decide accountability, which is who answers for a machine-assisted decision that goes wrong. It does not decide capability, which is what the organisation keeps practising so that somebody can still tell when the machine is wrong. And it does not decide the reinvestment, which is what happens to the time or the money the machine frees. Those four are the strategy. The preference order is the slogan that sits on top of it.
The reason the slogan travels is that it sounds like a decision. A chief executive who says AI-first has said something bold and has committed to nothing specific, which is a comfortable place to stand until somebody asks a specific question. The Duolingo case shows what happens when the specific question arrives from outside: the company had no written boundary to point to, so it retreated to the softest available position. Shopify's memo was not more careful about the boundary, but it was published, dated, and framed as a question about work rather than a statement about people, which gave it somewhere to stand.
The record on what follows#
The evidence on what happens after the declaration is thin and points one way. Klarna, the most-cited AI-first customer service case, had its chief executive say in May 2025 that cost had been 'a too predominant evaluation factor' and that the result was lower quality; the company recruited people again. IBM automated a few hundred human resources roles and, by its chief executive's account, put the money into engineers and salespeople so that total employment rose. Both are operator accounts and neither published figures, which is the grade they carry in the evidence base. What they share is that the outcome turned on a choice made after the slogan: what to do with what the machine freed. The declaration decided nothing about that, in either direction.
McKinsey's 2025 survey found that the two things most associated with profit from generative AI were the chief executive owning the rules for how it is deployed and the redesign of workflows, held by 28 and 21 per cent of organisations respectively. Neither is a preference order. Both are the second sentence that AI-first never gets round to.
What nobody has measured#
No study compares organisations that declared AI-first with organisations that did not, and the two memos are two companies in one month. Shopify has not published what its headcount rule did to hiring or output. Duolingo's walk-back is a statement of intent, not a record of what changed. The McKinsey correlation explains a fifth of the variance in a self-reported outcome. This page argues from the shape of the decisions rather than from measured results, and says so.
The test#
A leadership team that has declared AI-first can find out in an hour whether it has a strategy. Write the list: every consequential decision the organisation makes, with each marked inform, recommend, execute or never. Put a name against each. State which work stays unaided so that people can still check the machine, and where the freed time goes. If that document exists, AI-first is the headline on a strategy. If it does not, it is a slogan, and the next public question will find that out. The rules for writing it are at rules before tools; the argument for who writes it is at AI leadership.
Key sources
- Lütke, T. (2025), memo reported in Shopify CEO tells teams to consider using AI before growing headcount. TechCrunch, 7 April 2025. Graded entry.
- von Ahn, L. (2025), reported in Duolingo CEO walks back AI-first comments. Fortune via Yahoo Finance, May 2025. Graded entry.
- Siemiatkowski, S. (2025), Klarna, reported by CX Dive from a Bloomberg interview. Graded entry.
- Krishna, A. (2025), IBM, reported by PYMNTS from a Wall Street Journal interview. Graded entry.
- Singla, A. et al. (2025). The state of AI. McKinsey. Graded entry.
Related SuperSkills research#
The four decisions the slogan leaves open are the subject of AI leadership; the list itself is how AI decision rights should be allocated; the reversals are gathered at what happened to the companies that cut staff for AI; and the question of who should hold the pen is at who should own AI strategy.
About this research#
Rahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), keynote speaker on AI and human capability, and founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. He has run, grown, bought and advised businesses with AI in them. Findings are attributed to the studies and statements that produced them and kept separate from the interpretation. This is a living reference, reviewed and updated as significant new evidence appears.
Evidence review · SS-2026-241 · Graded against the published rubric
Hirji, R. (2026). Is AI-first a strategy or a slogan?. The SuperSkills evidence base, SS-2026-241. https://thesuperskills.com/research/is-ai-first-a-strategy-or-a-slogan. Last reviewed 15 September 2026.
An evidence review by Rahim Hirji, not peer-reviewed research. For a material claim, cite the underlying study as well; every study here carries its own permanent link.
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