In Jack Dorsey’s view of the world, the position most at risk from the AI revolution is middle management.
Dorsey argues in a new essay, “From Hierarchy to Intelligence,” published with Roelof Botha, managing partner at Sequoia Capital, an investor in Block, that his company’s decision to cut roughly 4,000 of its more than 10,000 employees was not a cost-cutting but a permanent restructuring to replace middle managers with AI.
Corporate hierarchy, the essay maintains, has always existed to solve a problem: routing information through organizations too large for a single person to oversee.
Managers add context from below, act as messengers from above, and maintain alignment between teams. AI can now perform those functions continuously and at scale, the authors argue, making the messenger redundant.
Instead of layers of management, Dorsey and Botha propose two “world models” powered by AI.
One aggregates internal data from code, decisions, workflows, and performance metrics to create a continually updated picture of the company’s operations, replacing the context traditionally carried by managers.
The other maps customer and merchant behavior using transaction data from Cash App and Square.
Those models feed what Block calls an “intelligence layer” that dynamically composes financial products to adapt to market demand.
If done correctly, the models absorb the coordination work that previously justified the existence of middle managers.
Rather than building from fixed roadmaps, the trial proposes breaking down Block’s business into modular capabilities, including payments, lending, card issuance and payroll.
When the system identifies a need, the essay example is a merchant facing a seasonal gap in cash flow, creates a solution from existing capabilities. When this is not possible, the missing capacity defines what is built next, replacing the product roadmap with a system-generated backlog.
The organizational structure is reduced accordingly. Block plans to operate with three roles: individual contributors who build the system, directly responsible individuals who own specific results in 90-day cycles, and player-coaches who remain active while developing people.
Dorsey told Wired in early March that the restructuring was prompted by a capability shift he saw in December in tools like Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s Codex 5.3, which he said was now capable of operating effectively on large codebases.
But current and former Block employees told The Guardian that about 95% of AI-generated code changes still require human modification, and that AI tools cannot yet lead the way in regulated areas like banking and money transfers.
