Dorsey cuts 40% of Block's staff to rebuild the company around AI

Jack Dorsey explains why he laid off nearly half of Block's employees

One of Silicon Valley's best-known serial entrepreneurs has taken an unprecedented step: Jack Dorsey has laid off 40 percent of the staff at his fintech company Block in order to effectively rebuild it from scratch, this time around artificial intelligence. In an exclusive interview with WIRED, Block's CEO publicly explained for the first time the logic behind a decision that is one of the largest corporate layoffs in the tech sector in recent years.

Dorsey has long been known for his taste for radical rethinks. He created Twitter and was removed from its leadership twice, founded the Square payment system, later renamed Block, and has never hidden his interest in bitcoin as an alternative financial system. But what he describes now goes beyond an ordinary corporate restructuring. According to him, the goal is to turn Block into a company built as an "intelligence." This is neither a metaphor nor a marketing slogan: Dorsey means an architectural overhaul of the business in which AI is not a tool layered on top of existing processes but their foundation.

Context matters for grasping the scale. Block is not a startup looking for its niche but a mature public company with billions in revenue, serving millions of customers through the Square and Cash App payment services. Laying off 40 percent of such an organization means cutting away not only administrative fat but also living tissue of day-to-day operations. It is a bet with very high stakes, and Dorsey, by all appearances, understands this perfectly. The decision came at a moment when the tech industry is going through a deep reassessment of AI's role: after the initial wave of experiments, companies are increasingly asking how to rebuild core processes rather than simply bolt a chatbot onto an interface.

The concept of a company "as an intelligence" assumes that a significant share of functions previously performed by people, from data analysis to operational decision-making, moves to automated systems. That does not mean human labor disappears entirely, but its role changes fundamentally: fewer people executing routine processes, more people who design, train and oversee those systems. Dorsey sees Block not as a fintech company with AI features but as an AI organism that solves financial problems. The difference is subtle, but it is exactly what determines how many people, and which people, the company needs.

For the industry, the signal is unambiguous: what used to be discussed in theory, replacing traditional corporate structures with AI-native ones, is starting to happen in practice, publicly and with concrete numbers. Dorsey, who has a rare ability to react to technological shifts before others, is effectively running an experiment in real time. If the revamped Block delivers strong financial results, it will become a precedent that dozens of companies cite to justify their own mass layoffs. If not, it will be one of the costliest failures of the era of AI enthusiasm.

For the laid-off employees, this talk of a "company as an intelligence" is the harsh reality of a labor market where the speed of technological change outpaces people's ability to adapt. For those who stayed at Block, it means working in a state of constant experimentation, where the rules are written on the fly. For the whole industry, it is a new benchmark for how far a CEO can go when convinced that AI changes not only products but the very nature of the organization.

Jack Dorsey has always been able to turn personal convictions into corporate strategies with global consequences. The question is whether his new conviction will prove prophetic or premature, and at what price we will get the answer.