Today, Ridge is a nine-figure business with radical efficiency—bringing in $5 million in revenue per employee. That’s not because we’re working people harder; it’s because we’ve systematically deployed AI across every function of our business. Ten years ago, Ridge would have needed 50 extra employees just to operate at our current scale. 

I know what it’s like to watch costs creep up while wondering if you can afford another hire. The answer isn’t just working smarter—it’s leveraging AI to transform how your entire team operates. Ahead, I’ll share exactly how we’re doing it.

Optimize your workflow with AI 

   

1. Start with customer service—your gateway to AI

Most founders overthink their AI strategy. They want to deploy it everywhere at once or they’re paralyzed by the complexity. Customer service is your easiest win, and it’s where you should start. We’re now handling 60% of our support tickets with AI. But here’s what surprised me: Our customers actually prefer it. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) improved from 90 to somewhere between 95 and 97 after we automated customer service. Customers love talking to the AI because it’s faster, more accurate, and available 24/7.

The setup isn’t complicated. We built our system to handle common inquiries—order tracking, returns, product questions—while routing complex issues to humans. The key was feeding the AI our historical ticket data so it learned our voice and policies. The real benefit is that my human customer service team can now focus on the complicated cases that require more judgment and empathy. The AI handles the volume while humans handle the nuance.

2. Turn your entire team into data scientists

I used to have a bottleneck problem. My team would pull reports from Shopify, stare at spreadsheets, and then wait for someone with data skills to actually analyze what was happening. That waiting killed our speed.

Now my entire team is operating like data scientists, and they didn’t need to learn Python or SQL. Anyone can take a screenshot of a Shopify report, drop it into ChatGPT, and get instant analysis. What does this trend mean? Which products are underperforming? Where should we focus our inventory dollars?

This democratization of data analysis has been massive for us. Marketing managers make faster decisions, and inventory planners spot trends earlier. Everyone has the autonomy to answer their own questions instead of waiting in line for the data team. The key is empowering your team to experiment with AI tools. Some of my best implementations came from team members just trying stuff and sharing what worked.

3. Build an AI-powered ad factory

We generate 500 static ads per day automatically. Yes, you read that right—500 ads daily.

Here’s how the math works: 450 of those ads are horrible. We’ll never run them. But the top 10% are somewhere between five- and seven-out-of-10 quality. That’s good enough to get ad spend behind them and test them in-market. The future of advertising is just shots on goal.

We built this using custom GPTs combined with automation. I took our best performing ads—the ones my design team created that I know work—and fed them into a custom GPT. Then we automated the whole process so it’s constantly generating new variations, and dropped them into a Google Drive, ready for our team to review and deploy.

Look, will AI create your absolute best performing ad? No. My design team still creates the 10-out-of-10 ads that become our winners. However, when Facebook is delivering personalized ads to different audiences based on what they like, you need volume. You need to test more creativity than any human team could possibly produce.

4. Replace departments, not just tasks

I’m not just automating tasks with AI—I’m running entire business functions with a fraction of the headcount. This is where AI gets really exciting. We maintain six Shopify Markets (Stores) and multiple landing pages with only two engineers. We’re able to balance a complete site rebuild, launch new features, and still maintain all our infrastructure. We’ll probably never have to hire another engineer as our business continues to grow, which is crazy to say.

Inventory is another major one. We used to have three people in inventory planning and buying. Now I have one inventory director handling everything. We feed our sales data, trends, launch calendar, and forecasts into an AI model that does the complex analysis. That one person reviews it, applies judgment, and makes the calls.

Our customer service team went from 10 to a team of four managing higher volume with better satisfaction scores. The compound effect of this across multiple departments is what gets you to $5 million per employee. It’s not one dramatic change—it’s systematically finding these opportunities across your entire operation.

Operating this efficiently isn’t a luxury anymore, it’s becoming a competitive necessity.

CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) on Facebook have gone up 500% since 2014. When I started, you could reach a thousand people for $2, and now most brands are happy to hit a three times return on ad spend—meaning a third of all revenue goes to marketing. 

Brands are constantly competing against businesses spending hundreds of millions on marketing and against no-name companies on TikTok Shop and Temu that beat them on price. The only way to win in that middle is efficiency. You have to generate more output per dollar, per person, per hour than your competition. AI is what makes that possible.

I know this creates uncomfortable questions about jobs, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it—I eliminated positions this year. I’ve also empowered the people who remain to do more interesting work, make bigger impacts, and keep their jobs in a competitive market where inefficient companies won’t survive. The brands that embrace AI—not as a nice-to-have but as core infrastructure—those are the ones that will thrive over the next decade.

Ridge grew from a company fulfilling orders in a garage to hitting $5 million in revenue in a single day. We got there by being relentless about testing, about efficiency, about finding every possible edge. Tune in to my full Shopify Masters episode for more tips on scaling and harnessing the power of AI in your business.