Block CFO Amrita Ahuja Defends Jack Dorsey’s A.I.- Layoffs as A.I. Bet

Block’s decision to cut 40 percent of its staff in February shocked many in Silicon Valley, but the company says the move was the culmination of a long-planned shift toward A.I.-driven operations, not a spur-of-the-moment cost cut. “This has been a two-year journey for us,” Amrita Ahuja, Block’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer, said at the WSJ CFO Council in Palo Alto, Calif., today (March 24). “Now, we’ve built enough A.I. use cases that we have the confidence that we can do remarkable work, and actually do it much faster.”

Block, the parent company of Square, Cash App and Afterpay, was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, who in February announced plans to cut roughly 4,000 roles. The reductions brought headcount down from about 10,000 to 6,000 after years of rapid hiring that saw staffing more than double from 4,000 in 2019.

Ahuja, who joined Block in 2019 after roles at Fox Networks Group, McKinsey and The Walt Disney Company, said the leaner workforce makes room to reinvest in an A.I.-first strategy, including infrastructure, compute tokens, and A.I.-native employees. “This has given us the room to do that,” she said.

She argued that the timing was driven by how quickly the technology has improved. “The speed and iteration time is dramatically different today than it was, frankly, even six months ago,” Ahuja said, noting that developer productivity has risen 40 percent since September. “It feels like the acceleration is only quickening.”

Those productivity gains show up in Block’s financials. Before and during the pandemic, the company generated about $500,000 in gross profit per employee, a figure that stayed flat even as headcount swelled. After deploying internal A.I. tools, gross profit per worker climbed to $750,000 in 2024 and $1 million in 2025. If Block meets its 2026 outlook, Ahuja said, that number should reach roughly $2 million per employee this year.

Much of the internal A.I. work centers around Goose, an in-house agent that has been in production for about 18 months and is used by both engineers and nontechnical teams. On the customer side, Block is rolling out tools such as Square AI, a conversational assistant for merchants; ManagerBot, which automates tasks like inventory ordering; and MoneyBot, which answers Cash App users’ questions about their finances.

Still, Block’s move has become a flash point in a broader debate over whether companies are racing ahead of reality when it comes to A.I. and layoffs. A recent Harvard Business Review survey of more than 1,000 executives found that 21 percent had implemented large layoffs in anticipation of A.I., compared with just 2 percent who attributed cuts to A.I. that was actually in use.

Ahuja said Block’s announcement has already drawn intense interest from peers. “We had people coming out of the woodwork to find out how we built the confidence to do it,” she said, adding that she expects more companies to follow. Others adopting similar strategies is an “inevitability,” in her view. “As a CFO, I think it’s better to be a little bit early than to be too late here.”