Shopify‘s chief operating officer has put a new label on what the AI era demands from workers, and the Shopify X-shaped employee concept represents a deliberate break from the T-shaped model that many technology companies have treated as the gold standard for talent for years.
Jess Hertz made the case on an episode of the Rapid Response podcast released on Wednesday. The T-shaped model, she explained, describes someone with broad general capabilities and deep expertise in one discipline, a profile that has guided hiring and team design across the technology industry. AI, she argued, is rendering that model insufficient.
What the X-shaped model actually means
‘What I think we’re starting to see is AI is really pushing towards what I’m calling X-shaped people,’ Hertz said. ‘You have different vectors of expertise, and you’re really moving away from just the expectation that you have to have depth in this one area.’
The key attribute she identified is adaptability at speed. X-shaped people have, in her words, ‘multiple spikes of expertise’, the ability to absorb complex concepts quickly and to develop competence across domains that would previously have required years of specialised training. ‘Being able to absorb complexity, being able to learn new spaces, being able to be a seven out of 10 designer if you want to be,’ she said, illustrating how the bar for functional cross-disciplinary skill has shifted as AI tools lower the cost of acquiring it.
The framing is not purely about individual capability. Hertz was equally focused on what the shift means for how organisations build teams. ‘The other part is really how do those different shaped people actually intersect with each other,’ she said. ‘The idea of team composition and the different constellation of people will only become more and more important as we enter this AI world.’ In other words, the question is not simply what one person can do, but how a group of X-shaped individuals combine their overlapping and diverging spikes.
Hertz joined Shopify in 2021 as general counsel, having previously served in the Biden administration, including as White House staff secretary. She became the company’s COO in 2025.
Shopify X-shaped employee thinking fits a broader mandate from the top
The podcast comments sit within a wider push at Shopify to make AI use non-negotiable rather than optional. Last year, chief executive Tobi Lütke went viral after mandating AI use across the company, and said that questions about how employees use AI would form part of performance reviews. An internal memo was subsequently leaked and Lütke posted it publicly on X. ‘Before asking for more head count and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,’ he wrote in the April memo.
The combination of Lütke’s structural mandate and Hertz’s talent framework suggests Shopify is trying to institutionalise AI integration from both ends: from the top down through policy, and from the hiring process upward through the profile of people it brings in.
Other technology leaders have been articulating similar, if differently framed, positions. Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, said in a February television interview that people with a humanities background are as important as ever, precisely because AI models perform strongly on STEM tasks. ‘When we look to hire people at Anthropic today, we look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious and want to help other people,’ she said.
JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon made a related point in an interview last year, urging workers to invest in the capabilities AI cannot easily replicate. ‘My advice to people would be critical thinking, learn skills, learn your EQ, learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write,’ he said.
Hertz’s X-shaped framing maps onto this emerging consensus in one respect: raw technical depth in a single domain is no longer sufficient on its own. Where her model adds something specific, however, is the insistence that workers develop genuine competence across multiple areas rather than settling for broad but shallow awareness, a distinction the T-shaped model had always reserved for depth in one column of the letter. The X presses for two or more.
Shopify has not published criteria for how the X-shaped employee profile will be operationalised in hiring or performance assessment, but Hertz’s April podcast appearance marks its first public articulation at a senior level, with team-composition strategy identified as the next frontier the company intends to think through.