AI won’t only change how work is done, but it could transform organizational structures too.
Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Block — the payments company that owns Square, Cash App, and Afterpay — believes AI will allow him to manage all 6,000 of the company’s remaining employees directly, eliminating most of the management layers that sit between him and the ground floor. It sounds like a punchline. He admits as much. But his argument is serious.
“We are early in it,” Dorsey said. “One measurement of how far along we are would be the depth from me to any other individual in the company. I would say our max depth right now is probably five people between me and anyone in the company. I would want to get that down to two to three this year.”
The end goal is more radical still: “In the most ideal case, there is no layer. Everyone in the company reports to me — and that would be all 6,000 of the company.”
He anticipates the obvious objection. “That feels somewhat ridiculous when you consider the old structure,” he said, “but when you consider that the majority of our work is going through this intelligence layer, it’s a lot more manageable — and that goes into the roles going forward.”
What those roles look like is specific. Dorsey wants to normalize the company down to just three: “The first is an IC, which is a builder or an operator — a salesperson, an engineer, a designer, a product person. Whatever it is, they’re actually working with the tools to build or to operate the company. They’re augmented because they have access to agents. So one person can potentially do the work, or explore the breadth, that it would take a team — or 10 people — to do in the past.”
The implications are significant. Block has already moved aggressively in this direction. In February, the company laid off 4,000 employees — nearly 40% of its workforce — with Dorsey explicitly citing AI as the cause. His position is that this was not a cost-cutting measure dressed up in AI rhetoric, but a genuine structural reset. In a co-authored essay titled “From Hierarchy to Intelligence,” published with Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, he argued that corporate hierarchy has always existed to solve one problem — routing information through organizations too large for any single person to oversee — and that AI now does that job better than people do.
That’s a claim worth scrutinising. Klarna famously boasted that AI was handling the work of 700 employees, then quietly began rehiring as customer satisfaction dropped. Block’s own employees have noted that roughly 95% of AI-generated code still requires human modification.
Still, Block’s numbers are hard to ignore. Production code shipped per engineer reportedly rose over 40% since September 2025. Gross profit guidance for 2026 sits at $12.2 billion, up from $10.36 billion in fiscal 2025 — and the company now has 40% fewer people to generate it.
Block is not alone in using AI to rethink headcount and hierarchy. McKinsey has cut 200 tech roles as it automates internal functions, while finance job openings have fallen to their lowest levels since the 2008 financial crisis, in a decline that began almost precisely when large language models went mainstream in enterprise settings. The pattern Dorsey is describing — fewer managers, AI handling coordination, individual contributors doing more with agents — is not unique to Block. It may simply be the most explicit articulation of where many companies are quietly heading.
Whether an organization of 6,000 people can truly function with a single layer of management, or none at all, remains to be seen. But the fact that the argument is being made seriously — by a founder with real numbers behind him — is itself a signal worth paying attention to.