Jack Dorsey's Company: 4,000 White-Collar Workers Are Being Replaced by AI

Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

In the early hours of this morning Beijing time, Block, the fintech company owned by Jack Dorsey (also the founder of Twitter), announced a large-scale layoff plan — it will cut nearly 4,000 positions, reducing its total workforce from over 10,000 to less than 6,000, in order to drive a leaner, flatter, and AI-centric organizational structure.

Jack Dorsey himself is a fervent Bitcoin maximalist, believing that Bitcoin will ultimately become the native currency of the internet world. Block's business is also deeply intertwined with Bitcoin. Beyond directly holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet and providing products and services like trading, wallets, and mining, Block has also been a long-term funder of Bitcoin core developers.

But that's not the focus of this article — what this article truly wants to emphasize is that unlike other companies forced to lay off employees due to business contraction, Block proactively chose to cut nearly 40% of its positions during a period of simultaneous growth in business revenue and profit margins. Furthermore, while announcing layoffs, Block also raised its 2026 gross profit guidance to $12.2 billion.

Jack Dorsey explained the reason for this decision in the announcement: "Something has changed. We've seen that the intelligent tools we are building and using, combined with smaller, flatter teams, are giving rise to a new way of working — this fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company, and this change is accelerating rapidly... Rather than passively accepting change and slowly laying off people over the next few months or years, it's better to proactively embrace change now."

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

Overseas influencer and product growth expert Aakash Gupta pointed out that Block is not the first company to make this decision: "Block is not an isolated case. ASML laid off 1,700 people last month while also announcing record order volumes; Salesforce laid off 5,000 people after AI began handling 50% of customer interactions; Amazon laid off 16,000 people in January last year and another 14,000 in October... All these companies were still in a growth trend when they made the layoff decisions. Jack Dorsey is just saying out loud what everyone already knows tacitly, which is that AI tools combined with smaller teams have completely changed the way a company operates."

What's more noteworthy is that after Block announced its layoff plan, the capital market quickly gave its own response — Block's stock price surged 20%, increasing its market capitalization by nearly $6 billion on the spot. This means that for every position cut, approximately $1.5 million in enterprise value was created.

It has long been a societal consensus that AI will disrupt the job market and eliminate certain professions, but many still underestimate the speed at which this change is arriving. In the past few weeks, we witnessed the stir caused by Anthropic's "dimensionality reduction strike" against multiple industries like SaaS; we saw the public sentiment stirred by the article "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" with 30 million reads; and now we have Block proactively slimming down without concealing the reason.

Another counterintuitive reality is that people once believed the threat of AI to professions would follow a gradual order "from low-end to high-end." However, the actual situation is that, due to the immaturity in the field of physical interaction, the professions AI is starting to eliminate earliest are the white-collar jobs once considered relatively mid-to-high-end by the market. The reason for this is not complicated. The essence of white-collar work is performing the "input → process → output" of information based on specific industry standards, and this is precisely the area where AI large language models excel.

In this round of layoffs at Block, affected employees will receive 20 weeks of salary plus an additional week's compensation for each year worked, a $5,000 transition grant, and Block will continue to pay for their health insurance for 6 months and allow them to keep company equipment. The compensation terms are relatively good. But for these laid-off employees and the many more white-collar positions already threatened by AI, it's time to think about how not to be eliminated in the AI era.