Shopify's River Agent System Requires Public Slack Use
Shopify's River agent lives in Slack and can only be used in public channels, so employees learn by watching each other.
Shopify's internal AI agent system, River, operates exclusively within public Slack channels — private use is not permitted. The design forces every employee interaction with the agent into the open, where colleagues can observe and learn from what others do with it.
Developer Simon Willison drew the comparison to Midjourney's early Discord-only rollout, where keeping image generation in public servers became an accidental teaching mechanism: newcomers absorbed the craft of prompting simply by watching more experienced users work. Shopify appears to be applying that same logic deliberately to agentic AI adoption inside the company — making the learning curve visible and collective rather than siloed within private conversations. For organizations figuring out how to roll out internal AI agents at scale, the design choice signals that social visibility may be as important an adoption lever as the capabilities of the agent itself.