Shopify COO Jess Hertz said the $185 billion e-commerce company is shifting its hiring criteria toward what she calls 'X-shaped people'—workers with multiple deep areas of expertise rather than one specialty paired with broad general skills. She explained this change is driven by AI's growing role in the workplace, which demands employees who can absorb complexity and work fluidly across disciplines. Hertz made the comments on the Rapid Response podcast, noting Shopify recently posted $3.58 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 34% year-over-year.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-04
Anthropic has launched a developer blueprint that provides pre-built harnesses, patterns and guardrails for creating AI shopping and merchant agents using Claude. The kit includes reference implementations for retail, travel, telecom and ticketing use cases, plus a Claude Code plugin, and deploys across Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Cloud Vertex AI. Partners such as Accenture, Mastercard and Visa are collaborating to help merchants adopt the framework ahead of the holiday shopping season.
claude.com
· 2026-09-03
Shopify COO Jess Hertz says the company lets its engineering teams spend without limits on AI tools, a bet that's paying off as revenue climbs 34% even as headcount holds steady. Hertz frames this as part of Shopify's push to build the infrastructure that lets AI agents discover and purchase products on behalf of consumers, a shift away from the old model where big-budget brands dominated search rankings.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-02
GoKawiil