I want to tell you a story from inside Shopify that I can’t stop thinking about.
Not because it’s flashy. Not because it’s theoretical.
But because it quietly explains what’s changing right now and why so many capable people still feel stuck.
Inside Shopify, there’s a small team called the Product Support Network, or PSN.
Their job used to be very unsexy.
They helped product teams understand what customers were actually saying by doing deep dives into support tickets, interviews, reviews, sales notes, and internal feedback.
All real data.
All scattered across systems.
All painfully manual.
To do one good deep dive took days.
Sometimes weeks.
And no matter how good the insights were, they were always limited by how many humans could sift through the data.
That was the bottleneck.
Not ideas. Not demand. Human attention.
Two leaders on that team, Rich Brown and Cristan Brown, noticed something before most people did.
They weren’t engineers. They weren’t “AI people.” They weren’t trying to start a company.
They just realized that intelligence had quietly become cheap.
So instead of asking, “How do we work harder?” they asked a better question:
What if this entire workflow didn’t need to be constrained by human effort anymore?
They started experimenting. Bad prototypes. Half working tools. Messy side projects built with AI coding assistants.
Nothing impressive on the surface.
But then something snapped into focus.
They built a tool called Scout.
Scout lets anyone at Shopify ask a question in plain English and instantly search across live customer data. Support tickets. Reviews. Interviews. Sales conversations. Everything. Fully sourced. No guesswork.
The result?
About 25 percent of the entire company now uses it. Including the CEO. Including product leaders making real decisions.
And here’s the part that matters most.
The PSN team did not become elite engineers. They did not reinvent themselves. They did not suddenly turn into a different caliber of human.
They realized they were already good enough to build.
Cristan put it best when she laughed and said, “I was reviewing code yesterday. I have no business doing this.”
Except she did.
Because AI quietly moved everyone to about a 7 out of 10.
That line came from Shopify’s Chief Design Officer, and it stuck.
Everyone is now 7/10 at everything.
Not perfect. Not expert. But good enough to act.
And once that clicks, everything changes.
I’ve seen the exact same pattern play out inside DFY.
When we first started integrating AI into our own workflows, it wasn’t polished.
It wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t some big announcement.
It was duct tape. Side experiments. Automations that saved ten minutes here and twenty minutes there.
But the compounding effect was obvious.
Things that used to require specialists became “good enough.” Ideas that would have taken a quarter to test took a weekend. Decisions that used to stall suddenly moved.
Not because we became smarter.
Because we stopped underestimating what we could already do.
That’s the real lesson from the PSN team.
They didn’t wait to become qualified. They updated their internal model of what was possible.
If you’re exploring AI right now, or even thinking about building internal tools, the work in front of you is not learning more.
It’s updating your self concept.
Your goals probably need to expand. Your standards probably need to rise. Your identity definitely needs to catch up.
Not because you’re behind.
But because the baseline quietly moved, and most people are still operating as if it hasn’t.
If this feels obvious as you read it, that’s usually the signal.
— Jason