Last week, Block — the company behind Square, Cash App, and a dozen other products — announced that it was cutting nearly half of its workforce. Over 4,000 people, gone. Jack Dorsey's reasoning was blunt: AI makes it possible to operate with smaller, highly talented teams, and he'd rather make the cut all at once than bleed it out over years.
The stock jumped 24%.
Dorsey's shareholder letter announcing Block's restructuring is worth reading in full. Whether you agree with the move or not, it's one of the clearest articulations of how a CEO is thinking about AI's impact on organizational structure. His prediction that "the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion within the next year" is bold, and he's made a difficult choice that demonstrates his conviction.
I don't know if Block's bet is the right one. I'm not close enough to their business to judge whether cutting 40% of their people in one move is bold leadership or reckless overreach. But I do know that Block isn't an isolated case. Pinterest, CrowdStrike, Chegg — the list of companies directly attributing layoffs to AI continues to grow. Something structural is happening, and we'd be foolish to ignore it.
Like it or not, the market is rebalancing as we enter a period of change, disruption, and unpredictability. My gut is that we're in for a handful of years of aggressive back-and-forth corrections as companies try to figure out what their workforce should actually look like in a world with highly capable, accessible, and increasingly powerful AI. As a result, we should be bracing ourselves for that future.
Even if we take Block's argument at face value — that they can continue operations with 6,000 people instead of 10,000 — I'd wager that they'll need to scale talent back up, but it won't be with the same roles. They'll be hiring for entirely new positions — AI-first roles that didn't exist in a pre-AI world. Think AI operations managers, human-AI workflow designers, AI quality assurance specialists, and roles we haven't even discovered yet.
Whether you're a developer, a project manager, a designer, or a CTO, the question isn't if your role is impacted by AI — it's how. And the follow-up question is even more important: how do I take advantage of it?
I've been thinking about this a lot, both for myself and for the teams I work with. The people who will thrive in this next chapter are the ones who are willing to be honest, curious, and brave. I'd challenge all of my readers to ask some difficult questions:
- Are there responsibilities of mine that could be handled entirely by AI, and how much whitespace does that create for me in my day-to-day? How can I leverage that whitespace to make myself more valuable to my business?
- Are there responsibilities of mine that will be turbocharged by AI, and what does that boost mean in terms of my productivity?
- Are there major opportunities for me to contribute in new and exciting ways that were impossible or impractical prior to AI, and how can I quickly harness that value?
- What parts of my job are resilient to AI disruption -- judgement, business context, relationships, creativity, empathy -- and how can I lean in to maximize the human value that I bring to my employer?
The temptation is to dig in our heels. To insist that the way we've always done things is the way we'll keep doing them. I understand that impulse — it's human. But it's also dangerous. Those who choose to adapt, to rethink their jobs in a post-AI context, will rise to the top. Those who don't will find themselves on the wrong side of that swinging pendulum.
We're in for a challenging few years. But challenging doesn't mean hopeless — it means interesting. Stay curious, inquisitive, and fearless — the future is as exciting as you make it.
