Jack Dorsey of Block is painting a striking picture of the AI-integrated workplace, one where smart systems step in to handle coordination that once required layers of human managers.
Just weeks after Block cut around 40% of its workforce, or roughly 4,000 jobs, the Block co-founder and lead independent director, Roelof Botha, argues that artificial intelligence can now track projects, spot problems early, hand out tasks, and spread key details across teams far quicker than people ever could.
Block sees itself in the early days of shifting toward this kind of setup, where technology does much of the heavy lifting on day-to-day operations. The pair directly challenges a long-held belief in business: that companies must stay locked into rigid hierarchies with humans acting as the main glue holding everything together.
“Instead, we intend to replace what the hierarchy does,” they wrote.
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Most organizations today hand workers an AI copilot and call it progress, but that only tweaks the old model without fixing its core flaws. Dorsey and Botha want something more radical, like an AI-integrated workplace designed from the ground up as a living intelligence, something they describe as a mini-AGI.
In their view, the company itself becomes a kind of smart system that learns and adapts continuously. This push comes at a tense moment for the tech industry. Many firms have trimmed staff while pointing to AI as a key driver for change.
At Block, the February cuts were significant, dropping headcount from over 10,000 to under 6,000. Dorsey has been open that the rapid rise of these tools forced a hard look at how the business operates if it wants to remain competitive. Some laid-off employees were quietly brought back in March, showing that the transition isn’t clean or painless.
Even so, people aren’t disappearing from the picture in this AI-integrated workplace. Dorsey and Botha stress that humans will keep making the big calls on strategy, business direction, and especially ethical questions. The plan reorganizes employees into three main types of roles to fit the new reality.
“Individual contributors” focus on building and caring for the core operating systems that keep things running. “Directly responsible individuals” take ownership of specific challenges and get freedom to pull in whatever tools or support they need to solve them.
Then there are the “player-coaches,” who offer guidance and mentoring like managers once did, but they also roll up their sleeves to keep coding and creating alongside everyone else.
What is the thinking behind the AI-integrated workplace?
In most companies, information crawls up the chain from frontline workers to managers, then to executives, before decisions trickle back down. That worked reasonably well for decades, but it has clear limits. Delays build up. Details get lost or distorted.
By the time leaders see a full picture, opportunities may have already slipped away. In a remote-first environment where much of the work leaves a digital trail, AI can watch everything in real time, including what’s progressing smoothly, what’s stuck, how resources are spread, and which efforts are actually delivering results.
This constant, living overview gives leaders something hierarchies rarely manage: an up-to-the-minute view of the entire operation. Dorsey and Botha point out that companies ultimately move at the speed of their information flow.
Layers of middle management, no matter how well-meaning, tend to slow that flow down through meetings, approvals, and handoffs. The real question, they suggest, was never whether coordination layers were necessary. It was whether humans had to fill every one of those spots forever. With today’s tools, the answer is clearly no.
Of course, building an AI-integrated workplace like this won’t happen overnight, and Block admits they’re still figuring it out. Parts of the experiment will probably break before they click into place. Some decisions may need walking back, as already happened with a handful of returning staff. Yet the authors believe the underlying pattern is treating the company as an intelligence rather than a pyramid of people that carries enough power to influence how all kinds of organizations run in the years ahead.
Critics might see the timing of AI-integrated workplaces as convenient, coming right after deep cuts.
Others wonder how much is genuine reinvention versus standard cost-cutting dressed up in futuristic language. Dorsey has countered that the business remains strong, with growing profits in key areas, and that smaller, better-equipped teams paired with powerful tools can achieve more than bloated structures ever could. He has even suggested that many companies will reach similar conclusions soon.
Whether Block fully realizes this vision or not, the conversation Dorsey and Botha started forces a fresh look at old assumptions. The AI-integrated workplace they describe isn’t about removing humans, but it’s about freeing them from repetitive coordination so they can focus on higher-value work, creativity, and judgment that machines still can’t replicate well.
It challenges leaders everywhere to ask, are we clinging to hierarchies because they feel safe or because they’re still the best option? As AI continues to advance, experiments like Block’s AI-integrated workplace will likely multiply. Some will succeed; others will stumble. But the direction feels unmistakable.
