Observer | Block CFO Amrita Ahuja Defends Jack Dorsey’s A.I.-Driven Layoffs by Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
-
Observer | Block CFO Amrita Ahuja Defends Jack Dorsey’s A.I.-Driven Layoffs by Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
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.
Read more: https://observer.com/2026/03/block-cfo-amrita-ahuja-defends-ai-layoff/
-
R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic