BlockS ‘ decision to cut 40 percent of its staff in February shocked many in Silicon Valley, but the company says the move was the culmination of a long plan the shift towards AI-driven operations, not a quick cost reduction. “This has been a two-year journey for us. Amrita AhujaBlock’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer said at the WSJ CFO Council in Palo Alto, Calif., today (March 24). “Now, we’ve built enough AI use cases that we’re confident we can do incredible work and actually do it much faster.”
Block, the parent company of Square, Cash App and Afterpay, was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorseywhich in February announced plans to cut around 4,000 roles. The cuts reduced the number of employees from around 10,000 to 6,000 after years of rapid hiring that saw the number of staff more than double from 4,000 in 2019.
Ahuja, who joined Block in 2019 after roles at Fox Networks Group, McKinsey and The Walt Disney Companysaid the leaner workforce creates room to reinvest in an AI-first strategy, including infrastructure, computing tokens and local AI workers. “It’s given us the space to do that,” she said.
She argued that the timing was driven by how quickly technology has improved. “The speed and the iteration time is dramatically different today than it was, frankly, even six months ago,” Ahuja said, noting that developer productivity has increased 40 percent since September. “It feels like the rush is only getting faster.”
These productivity gains are reflected in the Block’s financials. Before and during the pandemic, the company generated about $500,000 in gross profit per employee, a figure that remained flat even as the number of employees increased. After deploying its internal AI tools, gross profit per employee rose to $750,000 in 2024 and $1 million in 2025. If Block meets its 2026 outlook, Ahuja said, that number should reach roughly $2 million per employee this year.
Much of the internal AI work centers around Goose, an internal agent that has been in production for about 18 months and is used by engineers and non-technical teams. On the client side, Block is rolling out tools such as Square AI, a conversational assistant for marketers; ManagerBot, which automates tasks like inventory sorting; and MoneyBot, which answers Cash App users’ questions about their finances.
Still, Block’s move has become a flashpoint in a broader debate over whether companies are racing ahead of reality when it comes to AI and layoffs. A recent Harvard Business Review survey of more than 1,000 executives found this out 21 percent had implemented major layoffs waiting for AI, compared to just 2 percent who attributed cuts to AI actually in use.
Ahuja said that Block’s announcement has already attracted a lot of interest from peers. “We had people come out of the woodwork to find out how we built the trust to do it,” she said, adding that she expects more companies to follow. The adoption of similar strategies by others is an “inevitable,” according to her. “As a CFO, I think it’s better to be a little early than too late here.”
