Jack Dorsey says AI should replace the middle manager after Block cuts 4,000 jobs

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Dorsey's program strips retired mediate management, with AI handling coordination, merchandise decisions, and interior alignment.

Apr 1, 2026, 11:19 a.m.

In Jack Dorsey's presumption of the world, the occupation astir astatine hazard from the AI gyration is the mediate manager.

Dorsey argues successful a caller essay, "From Hierarchy to Intelligence," published with Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital's managing partner, an capitalist successful Block, that his company's determination to chopped astir 4,000 of its much than 10,000 employees was not a outgo simplification but a imperishable restructuring to regenerate mediate managers with AI.

Corporate hierarchy, the effort argues, has ever existed to lick 1 problem: routing accusation done organizations excessively ample for immoderate azygous idiosyncratic to oversee.

Managers aggregate discourse from below, enactment arsenic messengers from above, and support alignment crossed teams. AI tin present execute those functions continuously and astatine scale, the authors argue, making the messenger redundant.

In spot of absorption layers, Dorsey and Botha proposes 2 AI-driven "world models."

One aggregates interior information from code, decisions, workflows, and show metrics to make a continuously updated representation of institution operations, replacing the discourse that managers traditionally carried.

The different maps lawsuit and merchant behaviour utilizing transaction information from Cash App and Square.

Those models provender what Block calls an “intelligence layer” that composes fiscal products dynamically to acceptable marketplace demand.

If done properly, the models sorb the coordination enactment that antecedently justified the beingness of mediate management.

Rather than gathering from fixed roadmaps, the effort proposes breaking Block’s concern into modular capabilities, including payments, lending, paper issuance and payroll.

When the strategy identifies a need, the essay’s illustration is simply a merchant facing a seasonal currency travel gap, it assembles a solution from existing capabilities. When it cannot, the missing capableness defines what gets built next, replacing the merchandise roadmap with a system-generated backlog.

The organizational operation is reduced accordingly. Block plans to run with 3 roles: idiosyncratic contributors who physique the system, straight liable individuals who ain circumstantial outcomes connected 90-day cycles, and player-coaches who stay hands-on portion processing people.

Dorsey told Wired successful aboriginal Marchthe restructuring was triggered by a capableness displacement helium observed successful December successful tools including Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s Codex 5.3, which helium said was present susceptible of operating efficaciously successful ample codebases.

But existent and erstwhile Block employees told the Guardian that astir 95% of AI-generated codification changes inactive necessitate quality modification, and that AI tools cannot yet pb successful regulated areas similar banking and wealth transfers.

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