Block CFO Amrita Ahuja Defends Jack Dorsey’s AI- Layoffs as AI bet

Block’s decision to cut its workforce by 40 percent in February shocked many in Silicon Valley, but the company says the move is the result of planned AI-driven operational changes, not temporary cost-cutting. “This has been our two-year journey,” said Amrita Ahuja, Block’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer, at the WSJ CFO Council in Palo Alto, Calif., today (March 24). “Now, we’ve built enough AI use cases to feel confident that we can do a great job, and do it very quickly.”

Block, the parent company of Square, Cash App and Afterpay, was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, who said in February. announced plans to cut about 4,000 roles. The layoffs reduced the workforce by nearly 10,000 to 6,000 after years of rapid hiring that saw the workforce 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 small workforce is making room to reinvest in the initial AI strategy, including infrastructure, computing tokens, and native AI workers. “This gave us an opportunity to do that,” he said.

He pointed out that time is driven by how fast technology has developed. “The time to accelerate and iterate is very different today than it was, frankly, even six months ago,” Ahuja said, noting that engineer productivity has increased 40 percent since September. “It feels like the acceleration is only accelerating.”

Those productivity gains come from Block Finance. Before and during the pandemic, the company made an estimated profit of $500,000,000 per employee, a figure that remained low as the population grew. After removing internal AI tools, gross profit per employee increased to $750,000 in 2024 and $1 million in 2025. If Block meets its 2026 vision, Ahuja said, that number should reach about $2 million per job this year.

Most of the internal AI work centers around Goose, an in-house agent that has been in operation for about 18 months and is used by both developers and non-technical teams. On the client side, Block releases tools like Square AI, a chat assistant for merchants; ManagerBot, which performs tasks such as inventory management; and MoneyBot, which answers Cash App users’ questions about their finances.

Still, Block’s move has become a flashpoint in a broader debate about whether companies are running ahead of reality when it comes to AI and layoffs. A recent Harvard Business Review survey of more than 1,000 executives found that 21 percent used major layoffs in anticipation of AI, compared to only 2 percent who said AI cuts were actually being used.

Ahuja said Block’s announcement has attracted a lot of interest from peers. “We’ve had people come out of work to find out how we build confidence,” he said, adding that he expects more companies to follow suit. Others using similar techniques are “inevitable,” in his view. “As the CFO, I think it’s better to be here sooner rather than later.”