In Jack Dorsey’s worldview, the jobs most threatened by the AI revolution are middle managers.
In a new article, “From Hierarchy to Intelligence,” published with Sequoia Capital managing partner and Block investor Roelof Botha, Dorsey noted that his company’s decision to lay off about 4,000 people from its more than 10,000 employees is not a cost-cutting effort but a permanent reorganization to replace middle managers with artificial intelligence.
The article believes that the existence of corporate hierarchy has always been to solve a problem: transmitting information through the organization, and the organization is too large for any one person to supervise.
Managers aggregate background information from below, act as messengers from above, and maintain consistency across teams. The authors argue that AI can now perform these functions continuously and at scale, making messengers redundant.
Dorsey and Botha propose two AI-driven “world models” to replace management.
One approach is to aggregate internal data from code, decisions, workflows, and performance metrics to create a constantly updated picture of a company’s operations, replacing the context managers have traditionally held.
Another uses transaction data from Cash App and Square to map customer and merchant behavior.
These models power what Block calls an “intelligent layer” that dynamically combines financial products to adapt to market needs.
If done right, these models can absorb the coordination efforts that previously justified the existence of middle management.
The article suggests breaking Block’s business into modular functions, including payments, lending, card issuance and payroll, rather than building it according to a fixed roadmap.
When the system identifies a need, in this article’s case a merchant facing a seasonal cash flow gap, it assembles a solution based on existing functionality. When it can’t, the missing features define what to build next, replacing the product roadmap with a system-generated backlog.
The organizational structure was reduced accordingly. Block plans to play three roles: an individual contributor who builds the system, a direct owner with concrete results within a 90-day cycle, and a hands-on player coach who develops talent.
Dorsey told Wired in early March that the reorganization was prompted by a shift in functionality he observed in December in tools like Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s Codex 5.3, which he said are now able to run efficiently on large code bases.
But current and former Block employees told the Guardian that about 95% of AI-generated code changes still require manual modification, and AI tools have not yet been able to play a leading role in regulatory areas such as banking and remittances.
