Block’s decision to cut 40% of its staff in February shocked many in Silicon Valley, but the company says the move was the culmination of a long-planned shift toward AI-driven operations, not a sudden cost-cutting. “This has been a two-year journey for us,” Amrita Ahuja, Block’s CFO and COO, said at the Wall Street Journal CFO Council in Palo Alto, Calif., today (March 24). “Now, we’ve built enough AI use cases that we’re confident we can do great work, and do it much faster.”
Block, the parent company of Square, Cash App and Afterpay, was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, who in February It announced plans to cut nearly 4,000 jobs. The cuts have reduced staff numbers from about 10,000 to 6,000 after years of rapid hiring that saw headcount more than double from 4,000 in 2019.
A smaller workforce provides room to reinvest in an AI-first strategy, including infrastructure, computational code, and native AI personnel, said Ahuja, who joined Block in 2019 after working at Fox Networks Group, McKinsey and The Walt Disney Company. “It gave us the space to do that,” she added.
She said the timing was driven by how quickly the technology was improving. “The speed and iteration time is dramatically different today than it was, frankly, even six months ago,” Ahuja said, noting that developer productivity is up 40 percent since September. “It’s like the acceleration is just accelerating.”
These productivity gains show up in Block’s financial statements. Before and during the pandemic, the company generated about $500,000 in gross profit per employee, a number that has remained steady even as headcount has swelled. After deploying internal AI tools, gross profit per worker rose to $750,000 in 2024 and $1 million in 2025. If Block meets its 2026 forecast, that number should reach nearly $2 million per employee this year, Ahuja said.
Much of the AI’s internal work revolves around Goose, an internal agent that has been in production for about 18 months and is used by both engineers and non-technical teams. On the customer side, Block is rolling out tools like Square AI, a conversational assistant for merchants; ManagerBot, which automates tasks like ordering inventory; and MoneyBot, which answers Cash App users’ questions about their finances.
However, Block’s move has become a flashpoint in a broader debate over whether companies are racing ahead of reality when it comes to artificial intelligence and layoffs. A recent Harvard Business Review survey of more than 1,000 executives found this 21 percent laid off a large number of workers in anticipation of AI, compared to only 2% who attributed reductions to AI that was already in use.
Ahuja said Block’s announcement has already generated significant interest from his peers. “We’ve had people come out of the business to see how we built the trust to do this,” she said, adding that she expects more companies to follow suit. In her view, others adopting similar strategies is “inevitable.” “As a CFO, I think it’s better to be a little early than too late here.”
