‘Reflexively reaching for AI’: Shopify CEO reveals how he used Claude AI to replace traditional Windows software

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke has shared the story of how he used AI to fix an important issue with his annual MRI scans. Lütke shared that his annual MRI scan came in a USB stick which required commercial Windows software to open it. Instead of looking for such software online, Lütke instead used AI to fix the workflow for him.

The Shopify CEO says he ran Claude AI on the USB stick and asked it to make a web-based viewer for the data. Lütke then said that he used another prompt to even annotate the data on his MRI scans.

“My annual MRI scan gives me a USB stick with the data, but you need this commercial Windows software to open it. Ran Claude on the stick and asked it to make me an HTML-based viewer tool. This looks… way better.” he wrote in a post on X.

“btw this is a good example of what i meant with “reflexively” reaching for AI. You tinker with AI for a while, and you just reach for this. This was an obvious thing to try when I saw I needed to use Windows and was on my Mac. You want to train your brain on this intuition.” he added.

Notably, the recent viral use case by Lütke comes at a time when there has been a lot of debate around AI replacing a lot of jobs done by software engineers. In fact, Anthropic’s launch of an industry-specific plug-in for Claude Cowork had led to fears among investors about the disruption of traditional software and service-based models, leading to around $285 billion in wealth being wiped off from software companies.

Even Indian IT sector companies like TCS, Infosys and Wipro faced the brunt of the tool as they went on to hit their 52-week lows.

Meanwhile, the use of AI for medical purposes has also become another popular use case. Anthropic had also launched a separate Claude for Healthcare tool earlier this year to assist clinicians, insurers and patients by automating administrative tasks and providing grounded medical information.

The company had also added the ability in the US for Claude Pro and Max users to give Claude access to their lab results and health records in order to allow individuals to understand their health information better and prepare for important medical conversations with clinicians.