Jack Dorsey Proposes AI to Replace Hierarchies at Block

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Block, the fintech company behind Square and Cash App, outlined a vision on Tuesday for replacing traditional corporate hierarchies with artificial intelligence, weeks after announcing deep workforce cuts. In an essay co-authored with Roelof Botha, Block's lead independent director and a Sequoia Capital partner, Dorsey argued that AI can handle the coordination roles long filled by middle managers, enabling smaller teams to operate more efficiently.

The essay, titled "From Hierarchy to Intelligence," describes corporate structures as outdated information-routing systems designed for organizations too large for one person to oversee. Dorsey and Botha propose AI-driven "world models" to aggregate internal data on workflows, decisions, and performance, alongside external models tracking customer and merchant behavior through transaction data. These would feed an "intelligence layer" that dynamically assembles financial products, such as addressing a merchant's seasonal cash flow needs by combining existing capabilities in payments, lending, and payroll.

Block's restructuring builds on its February announcement to reduce headcount from more than...