AI’s Real Bottleneck? It’s Not Smarts, It’s Usability.

“We have plenty of intelligence. The problem is making it usable.”

Shopify’s CEO, Toby Lütke, recently lit a fire under his team. His internal memo, now public, was blunt: use AI daily, in every role, or your performance review will suffer. Harsh? Maybe. Surprising? Not really.

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CEOs everywhere see the AI goldrush. ChatGPT, Claude – the power is obvious. Yet, employees aren’t biting. Adoption crawls. Managers resort to threats.

Why? Because raw power isn’t enough.

Tools that do spread, like Cursor for coding or Granola for notes, often get dismissed. “GPT wrappers,” the critics sneer. As if the core engine is all that matters.

That’s like calling Instagram an “ImageMagick wrapper.” Or Dropbox an “rsync wrapper.” It misses the entire point.

Those products won not because of raw tech, but because they made complex power accessible through smart design.

The barrier to AI mass adoption isn’t a lack of intelligence. We have that in truckloads. The real wall? It’s User Experience. Getting AI to actually work for real people, in their real workflows. That’s the puzzle worth solving.