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Block ditches 4,000 staff, because AI can do their jobs (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 day ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff – around 4,000 people – because new "intelligence tools" the company is implementing “can do more and do it better.”

The company announced the sackings in the shareholder letter [PDF] accompanying its Q4 earnings announcement on Thursday. The payments and crypto company reported quarterly revenue of about $6.25 billion – up 3.6 percent year-over-year – and gross profit of around $2.9 billion. The company made $1 billion of gross profit in December 2025 alone. Full-year revenue came in at about $24.2 billion, and gross profit was around $10.36 billion.

“2025 was a strong year for us,” Dorsey wrote in the shareholder letter, before posing the question, “Why are we changing how we operate going forward?”

His answer, spread across the letter and a Xeet, is that AI has already changed the way Block works, so it needs to change its structure.

“We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly,” he wrote on X.

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[–] megopie@beehaw.org 1 points 8 hours ago

Any job that can be done by an LLM wasn’t a job that needed to get done In the first place.

any manager who tries to replace an actually useful job with an LLM is going to get bit in the ass as productivity slows to a crawl. Other people will hav to step in to clean up the mess and basically do the work that should have been done by the person replaced. Most of the jobs being “replaced by AI” are actually just routine layoffs or companies correcting from over hiring.

I’ve read a story the other day from someone who said they left Amazon due to what a mess it was becoming internally. How increasingly managers were hiring people they didn’t need so their team would be bigger and they would seem more important. This is a well known phenomenon. I suspect a lot of people who did this and created a mess are using the excuse of “embracing AI” to give them selves an off ramp from the mess they created by bloating their departments.