Jack Dorsey's company, 4,000 white-collar workers are being replaced by AI

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Early this morning Beijing time, Jack Dorsey (also the founder of Twitter)’s fintech company Block announced a large-scale layoff plan — cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, reducing the total staff from over 10,000 to less than 6,000, to promote a leaner, flatter, AI-centric organizational structure.

Jack Dorsey is a passionate Bitcoin enthusiast, a Bitcoin Maximalist who believes Bitcoin will eventually become the native currency of the internet. Block’s business is deeply connected to Bitcoin; besides holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet, offering trading, wallet, and mining products, Block is also a long-term supporter of Bitcoin core developers.

But that’s not the main point of this article — what I really want to emphasize is that, unlike other companies forced to cut jobs due to business contraction, Block is in a period of rising revenue and profit margins, and has proactively decided to cut nearly 40% of its positions. At the same time, Block has further raised its 2026 gross profit guidance to $12.2 billion.

In the announcement, Jack Dorsey explained the reason for this decision: “Some things have changed. We see that the smart tools we are building and using, combined with smaller, flatter teams, are creating a whole new way of working — fundamentally changing what it means to build and run a company, and this change is accelerating rapidly… Instead of passively accepting change and slowly cutting jobs over the next few months or years, it’s better to actively embrace change now.”

The changes Jack Dorsey mentioned are not new — the rapid development of AI is iterating the traditional productivity growth paradigm. In the past, companies relied mainly on linear growth in employee numbers to increase productivity and scale their business; but now, with rapidly evolving AI tools, companies can achieve exponential productivity growth while maintaining or even reducing their workforce.

Overseas industry experts and product growth specialist Aakash Gupta pointed out that Block is not the first company to make such a decision: “Block is not an exception. Last month, ASML laid off 1,700 people while announcing record-breaking order volumes; Salesforce laid off 5,000 after AI started handling 50% of customer interactions; Amazon laid off 16,000 in January last year, and another 14,000 in October… These companies were still in growth mode when they made these layoffs. Jack Dorsey is just voicing what everyone has been quietly thinking — that AI tools combined with smaller teams have completely changed the way companies operate.”

What’s even more noteworthy is that after Block announced its layoffs, the capital market responded quickly — Block’s stock price surged 20%, with a market cap increase of nearly $6 billion, meaning each job cut created about $1.5 million in enterprise value.

AI will disrupt the job market and eliminate some professions — this is a societal consensus, but many still underestimate the speed of this change. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Anthropic’s “dimensionality reduction” impact on industries like SaaS; we’ve also seen the public stir over the 30 million views of “The Global AI Crisis 2028”; now, we see Block proactively slimming down and openly explaining the reasons.

Another counterintuitive fact is that, while people once believed AI would eliminate jobs gradually from low-end to high-end, the reality is that, due to the immaturity of physical interaction fields, AI is first eliminating white-collar jobs that were considered relatively mid- to high-end by the market. The reason is simple: white-collar work is essentially based on industry-specific standards, involving “input → processing → output” of information, which is exactly what large AI models excel at.

In this round of layoffs at Block, affected employees will receive 20 weeks of salary plus an additional week’s pay for each year worked, as well as a $5,000 transition subsidy. Additionally, Block will continue to cover healthcare for six months and allow employees to keep company devices. The compensation package is quite good, but for these white-collar workers whose jobs are increasingly threatened by AI, it’s time to think about how to avoid being eliminated in the AI era.