In Jack Dorsey’s view of the world, the job most threatened by the AI revolution is the middle manager.
Dorsey argues in a new essay, “From Hierarchy to Intelligence,” published with Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital’s managing partner, an investor in Block, that his company’s decision to cut about 4,000 of its more than 10,000 employees was not a cost-cutting exercise, but a permanent restructuring to replace middle managers with AI.
Corporate hierarchy, the essay argues, has always existed to solve one problem: routing information through organizations too large for any single person to oversee.
Leaders gather context from below, act as messengers from above, and maintain alignment across teams. AI can now perform these functions continuously and at scale, the authors argue, making the messenger redundant.
Instead of management layers, Dorsey and Botha propose two AI-powered “world models.”
You gather internal data from code, decisions, workflows and performance metrics to create a continuously updated picture of the company’s operations, replacing the context that managers traditionally had.
The second maps customer and merchant behavior using transaction data from the Cash App and Square.
These models feed what Block calls an “intelligence layer” that dynamically assembles financial products to fit market demand.
If done properly, the models absorb the coordination work that previously justified the existence of middle management.
Instead of building from fixed roadmaps, the essay suggests breaking Block’s business into modular options, including payments, lending, card issuing and payroll.
When the system identifies a need, the essay example is a grocery store facing a seasonal cash flow gap, it assembles a solution from existing options. When it can’t, the lack of capacity defines what gets 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, direct-accountable people who own specific results on 90-day cycles, and player-coaches who stay hands-on while developing people.
Dorsey told Wired in early March that the restructuring was triggered by a capability shift he observed in December in tools including Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s Codex 5.3, which he said were now able to work efficiently in large codebases.
But current and former Block employees told the Guardian that around 95% of AI-generated code changes still require human modification, and that AI tools cannot yet lead in regulated areas such as banking and money transfers.
