AIBRIEF
Tobi Lütke coined 'slop grenades' on a podcast this week for unchecked AI work his own April 2025 mandate produced, and a 2025 BetterUp/Stanford study pegs the cleanup at 3.4 hours per worker per month.
On The Knowledge Project podcast released the week of September 16, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke named a workplace pattern his own April 2025 AI mandate produced as "slop grenades": AI-generated emails, memos, and code employees fire off without checking, dumping the review work on colleagues. Lütke conceded his memo had pushed workers to "go nuts" on AI, producing a deluge of unchecked output.
A BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab study fielded in September 2025 puts a price on the cleanup. In a survey of 1,150 U.S. full-time desk workers, 40% said they had received AI-generated work of this kind in the prior month, and workers reported spending roughly 3.4 hours a month redoing or correcting it. BetterUp's estimate: about $9 million a year per 10,000-person company in lost review time. Futurism rounds the same dataset to roughly $8.1 million per month.
The April 7, 2025 memo, "Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify," made the producer's saved minutes the visible number. The recipient's cleanup hours were invisible until a podcast mic was in front of the CEO. The open question is what Shopify changes in response, and whether other companies with similar mandates will follow.