How 12 Founders Are Using AI To Get Ahead

0:00Therabody Founder:Right now, in this exact moment, this founder's AI agents are running his business.

0:05The Black Tux Founder:It's running 24 hours a day. It's like replying back to customer emails from me right now and I'm not doing any work.

0:11Therabody Founder:Another founder was told point blank by her own factory that a critical product flaw just couldn't be fixed.

0:17Loftie Founder:The factory at that point was like, that's just how Bluetooth works. Like, we don't really know what to tell you.

0:21Therabody Founder:So instead of accepting it, her team solved the problem with AI.

0:25Loftie Founder:ChatGPT recommended this like technical workaround and sure enough, it fixed the problem.

0:28Therabody Founder:Then there's the founder answering the question everyone's afraid to ask out loud. Can you actually do more with less?

0:34The Black Tux Founder:We are able to have a much smaller engineering team due to AI and being on the Shopify platform.

0:40Therabody Founder:We brought 12 of the most forward-thinking founders building on Shopify right now. We asked every single one of them the same question. How are you actually using AI in your business today? What we got back wasn't theory and it wasn't hype. It was a playbook.

0:54Figs Founder:When I look at what it can do in just a click of an enter button, I'm like, wait a minute. Wow.

1:00Therabody Founder:But here's what felt unexpected. Not every founder is handing over the keys. I think that the creative spirit should be reserved for humans. And that's the real question. Not what AI can do, but what should it do? This conversation is going to be changing from week to week. 12 founders, the tools, the workflows, and the ways they're actually making AI work inside their businesses right now. This is Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and scaling your business. Let's kick things off with Katherine Getze, founder and CEO of Physical Phones. She's an AI educator who went analog and used the very tools she teaches to build a hardware company that made$800 ,000 in its first six months.

1:39Loftie Founder:We're actually using AI constantly to build this business because we're navigating such unclear territories and doing things we've never done before. Yeah, 100%. So like we've given actual like very technical electrical engineering feedback to the factory that was recommended to us by, you know, the different AI models that we're using to fix issues that we've run into.

2:01Therabody Founder:Can you give me an example?

2:03Loftie Founder:100%. So when we sent out our first round of phones, when we met our Christmas delivery, the number one most common piece of feedback that we heard from customers was this bug where basically, imagine you're sitting at home, you're paired to the physical phone, the physical phone is in the kitchen or it's across the room. And you're not taking a call right now, but you open up your phone, you're sitting on the couch and you start scrolling Instagram and you click on a reel and the audio from that reel starts coming out of the physical phone.

2:28Therabody Founder:Oh.

2:28Loftie Founder:Right? Because it's kind of like a Bluetooth speaker. Right. Super annoying, very weird. You're like, oh, disconnect Bluetooth, change the speaker, whatever. There's like some workarounds, but mostly it's just annoying. That was the number one piece of feedback that we got. And Josh, who was heading up product at the time, has since been promoted to the CEO. He went back to the factory and said, look, we got to fix this. And the factory at that point was like, that's just how Bluetooth works. Like, we don't really know what to tell you. And he, not taking no for an answer, basically took that to ChatGPT, explained the situation in detail.

2:57Loftie Founder:and ChatGPT recommended this like technical workaround. I think it's called like HFP or something like that. And he just sort of like lifted and shifted and brought it to the team. And they were like, okay, we can try it. And sure enough, it fixed the problem. So now on all future physical phones, audio from Spotify, Instagram, TikTok, they don't come out of the phone. They just will take calls essentially.

3:19Therabody Founder:On that front, do you have any advice for, I mean, for entrepreneurs, but also just all of us regular humans, it feels like there are new AI tools coming out every day. Sometimes it feels like they're coming out every few hours in terms of like how to keep your arms wrapped around it without getting totally overwhelmed.

3:38Loftie Founder:I know. I know. Believe me, first thing I want to say is just like, you're so not alone and nobody who feels this way is alone. This is literally my full-time job. And I am also like, how do I stay up to date with everything that's happening? What I will say is that I think there's a total misconception that in order to be on top of things with AI, you're using like 50 different tools in a day. We use one or two tools in the office on a regular basis, and we just know how to use them really, really well. It's way more about how we're using Chachapiti, how we're using Claude, which are the kind of two main front runners that I would point people to, and Gemini probably would be a close third, to just really get the most out of those tools.

4:17Therabody Founder:Go deep rather than broad.

4:18Loftie Founder:Yeah, exactly.

4:20Therabody Founder:What does a business look like when it runs itself? Supreme Ecom founder and CEO AC Hampton is living that answer. Ads getting cut, emails getting answered, agents running 24-7, whether he's working or not.

4:32The Black Tux Founder:I'm building three softwares. I'm actually launching three softwares this year. One of the softwares that I'm releasing is called Ecom Boss. It's actually about to release into the market next month. It's an AI video creation model where all you have to do is just upload your product from Shopify. And within 45 seconds, they can create you 10 different ads of real people holding the product, moving with the product, like walking around a park with the product, showing it being used, even like acting like they're eating it. Like if it's a tangible product, it creates you product images for your website.

5:07The Black Tux Founder:It gives you ad copy for your ads and it gives you everything that you need to start running ads right away. The content, the ad copy, the hooks, everything. And all you have to do is just talk to it, give it a text prompt, upload your product, and it can make you, you know, like I said, 100 ads in probably less than 10 minutes, which is absolutely crazy. But, you know, we have that we have an AI store builder that builds people's Shopify stores out in less than 10 minutes for 100 % free. We use AI for product research to scan the market and see the, you know, the products that are working the best.

5:42The Black Tux Founder:I mean, we're using AI in every single part of our funnel. And it's speeding it up so much. And the decision making too. Like you have ChatGPT, Claw, Gemini, these places that you can go and ask real professional experience to. Give them a prompt. Be like, you have 10 plus years of media buying experience. How would you handle this or handle that? And having that second voice to be able to do the things that are needed. And then, you know, nowadays I've even been able to start pushing out OpenClaw. If you know what OpenClaw is, it's like an AI that connects to Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT. And it's running on your laptop 24 hours a day.

6:25The Black Tux Founder:So it's like cutting my ads for me like right now and I'm not doing any work. It's like replying back to customer emails for me right now. And it just sends me a text message and it's like, hey, this customer came in and complained about this. Do you want me to send this over to your supplier? So it's like a whole operator that I just have been able to build up to keep running the store, even when I'm doing things like this. So AI has like completely taken over. Obviously, AI is never going to replace people, but it will replace the people who don't know how to use it. And that's kind of like we're integrating it across every single part of running this business.

7:00Therabody Founder:I mean, when you started this, basically the entire thing was like your own human manual labor. And now you've got all these tools. Are there places where that human touch is still super important?

7:14The Black Tux Founder:A thousand percent. The human touch comes with knowing the avatar. I think that that is the most important thing because AI can't feel emotion. And the one thing you do with marketing is push out emotion. So that's where I don't allow AI to touch in at all is pain points, how I'm solving problems. What are the desires that these people have? What are the complaints that they're having? How do I solve it? What are the, you know, what are the real feelings that these people have? You can't make that up with AI. And I don't, I don't like to push emotion over to that side. So really knowing who I'm talking to and the emotion that goes behind it, that's kind of like where it just can't be replaced.

7:51The Black Tux Founder:But yeah, I mean, when I first started, I used to, I mean, it used to take me, I'd say, what, five to seven days to probably build out a Shopify store. And now I can probably get a whole store and product pages built in under 30 minutes.

8:03Therabody Founder:Personalization and scale. Most brands pick one. FIG's co-founder and CEO Trina Spear is using AI to do both. AI is transforming businesses. It's definitely something that we're focused on. And I do think we are at the tip of the spear. Just being a digitally native company, being born on the internet before most businesses, having the amount of data that we have. How are you utilizing that data? In interesting ways, in impactful ways for who you're serving. And I think that's where it is and will continue to change the game. How are you more personalized, right, to a nurse who's 26 years old, living in Boston, working at M &GH, what she's doing, what she's wearing, how she's working, how she's interacted with us, not just on our site, but out in the world, across the internet, and utilizing all that to be more personalized and be more impactful to her experience.

8:59Therabody Founder:And so I think that's where I'm really excited to be delivering a better experience to our community. And then on the operational side, there's so much efficiency that we've already seen from a customer service perspective, from a marketing tools and how are you, you know, really moving faster and getting more efficiency over time. And so I think we're still at the beginning stage and so much more to come. But yeah, it's super exciting. I like what you're saying about utilizing it in some ways to make things feel more human versus less human. 100%. How do we get closer to you? Like we're super close and that's what we think about that all the time.

9:37Therabody Founder:How do we make that relationship even deeper? Digitally, right? Which has been hard to do because so much of our business is a digital experience. but you can make that feel just like this conversation I'm having with you online, maybe not even on our site with Agenda Commerce and things like that, right? So it's going to just be on your fingertips, right? And you're playing around with that right now? A hundred percent. I think we're, like I said, at the forefront of it and utilizing it in the right way because you can't do it if you don't have the data. You can't utilize AI at the highest level if you don't have millions.

10:11Therabody Founder:We have one of the largest healthcare databases in the world, Right? So it's all ripe to utilize these tools to better connect. And that's the power. Train it on the data. Yeah. And then utilize it to get closer to people. To the individual. How do I build individual connection at scale? How can I personalize at scale? He was a skeptic and then he wasn't. Founder of Therabody, Dr. Jason Worsland on what flipped the switch and how Dr. J in your pocket went from tagline to real product. AI is inescapable these days. I have to imagine it's being incorporated at Therabody somehow.

10:50Figs Founder:I mean, there's a lot of ways. We have our tech team, our CTO is super on top of that. And it's just as important to have it outside as it is to have it inside. And to know where your boundaries are. And to know how you're training these large language models. Like, how are you teaching it to know what you're doing inside of the practice? So, originally it was sort of structured. Like, let us figure out how we're going to incorporate AI into our daily work. And then when you look at our app, for example, there's a lot of information that comes in our app. I mean, we've got over 500 ,000 users a month, which is insane to me.

11:28Figs Founder:But that's a lot of data. And AI can aggregate that stuff so quickly. So if we have how many people are on our app for back pain, it's X amount of people. Okay, what's, and then you start drilling that down. That takes weeks. But when you have AI, it's super quick. And the goal with all of that is for us to be able to kick out a protocol or find the most important protocol so that we can focus on that. And then with AI, a lot of that stuff you can have, we have it, we call it Dr. J in your pocket. like you can have you can literally have your own bespoke treatments built in the the product so we have what we call coach by therabody and if you sign up for coach in our app it's basically an ai driven thing it's just aggregating all this information it's just giving you what i would give you it's literally the same thing so that it just makes scaling me and our protocols much easier that's probably the easiest the lowest hanging fruit uh around ai with therabody that could talk about is that did you have any initial reticence to that yes 100 because i'm like i've doubted it like how is it not gonna know how tall this person like you know like it can't be me can't be me like i don't i they're not looking at the person's affect you know your right side of your face is different than the left side of your face and kind of got to read that and like how are they moving how do they walk like where's their pain like I for sure doubted it for sure what got you on board I saw how it could aggregate information I saw how quickly it could come up with a an answer because we'd worked manually on a lot of those things I mean if I showed you the the number of spreadsheets we made with algorithms pick this one and then it goes to this one.

13:28Figs Founder:And then it goes to this one. I mean, to build that out, we did it. And so I know what that takes. And so when I look at what it can do in just literally the click of an enter button, and I'm like, wait a minute, wow. And what we're doing isn't so personal that it bothers me anyway. Because what I'm providing for you is a protocol that you're going to ultimately do to yourself anyway, or you're going to have a physical therapist or someone around you do that to you anyway. So it's not AI that's providing the service. It's AI that's providing the protocols. Does that make sense? So that's how we've, that's one of the ways we've incorporated it.

14:11Figs Founder:I know we do it across the board with engineering and operations. You know, there's so many things like that that just helps take off the burden.

14:22Therabody Founder:Not every founder is racing to automate everything. Melanie Bender, co-founder and CEO of Lore, is drawing a deliberate line, using AI as a supporting tool while keeping the craft firmly in human hands. Where a lot of brands use AI is generative AI for imagery, for copy, for all the creative side to a brand. And it's certainly possible to do that. It's helpful in a way. But for me, I really wanted to be a human-led organization, a human-led organization in terms of what we're creating for. Like I'm creating fragrances for humans. But also I think that flows through to how we create as well. We've experimented with it.

15:04Therabody Founder:Some things have worked well. Some things we ended up not moving forward with. and where I land if that really feels right is using generative AI as a supporting tool, not a central one, and using it when what we're trying to do defies the laws of physics. It's either physically not possible, like making a squig in the crop circle, which is one brief that we had, or it's not prudent to do in the real world, but not using AI as kind of a cheaper replacement for the real world. And that comes from just a love and a dedication for craft. There's incredible photographers out there, amazing videographers, prop stylists, you know, all these creatives who are contributing to making beautiful images.

15:55Therabody Founder:And I want us to be a part of supporting and contributing to that. Most of the copy for the brand I rate myself. So there's also not a lot of AI in that. You know, where I find it helpful is just kind of more copy editing. But as a whole, I want minds and hands to be making the vast majority of what Laura's putting out into the world. What if the right tools just made Mondays easier? Shock Surplus founder and CEO Sean Reyes breaks down exactly what that looks like.