mArch remembers the first time he wondered whether he was teaching the block’s AI tools to do their jobs – and maybe even replace them. He was in his fintech company fabulous anniversary party last September. As executives led a presentation on the productivity benefits of a new internal AI tool, Mark, who worked in the product department, discussed his concerns with coworkers. Although he wasn’t sure what would happen in a few years, he told a coworker sitting next to him that right now, there was no way the technology would be so advanced that it could propel the business forward without employees like him helping with the vision and strategy.
These AI tools were not active. He had to tell them what to do. The block still needs him, he thought.
“You can’t really do AI like that,” he told the Guardian, adding that, ultimately, “an employee is much more than a series of tasks”.
Mark was one of nearly 4,000 Block employees laid off last week. CEO Jack Dorsey said he has nearly halved the company’s workforce due to increased AI productivity. “Using the tools we’re building, a significantly smaller team can do more and do it better,” Dorsey wrote in a letter to shareholders.
But in interviews with the Guardian, seven current and recently laid off employees refuted Dorsey’s claim that current AI tools could essentially replace workers at this scale. The employees the Guardian spoke to requested anonymity for fear of putting their jobs at risk or being fired. They belong to different departments, including engineering and product, and many say Block’s AI tools can be helpful in their work. But many felt the cut was Dorsey’s way of winning back investor confidence after Block’s stock plunged in recent months following heavy exposure to the volatile cryptocurrency market.
George, who still works at Block, says it was a “show off to the market” and that investors believe Dorsey is not a strong CEO: “It was a bold move to shift the company away from crypto toward AI and change the public market narrative around the company.” The block’s stock surged after the announcement of AI-fueled layoffs.
one in The detailed Wired interview was published FridayDorsey said he made such drastic reductions in his workforce because “there was really some change in the sophistication of (AI) tools in December, including Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s Codex 5.3”. He rejected claims of higher hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic, saying the company was “at par or ahead of all our peers” in terms of gross profit per employee. He said the structure and management hierarchy of companies “is hindering everything we do”. He told Wired that his goal was to “make the company itself feel like a mini AGI.” The block did not provide any statement to the Guardian.
The block cuts come as widespread fears emerge over how the increased use of AI could lead to job cuts in the United States. Goldman Sachs noted in February that the increasing pace of AI adoption could increase unemployment this year and estimated that the technology caused 5,000 to 10,000 monthly net job losses in the US last year.
making your own replacements
First, Block encouraged its employees to use AI more often. Then, over the past nine months, that incentive turned into a requirement, workers told the Guardian. Dorsey made the point in a recording of a January internal all-hands meeting, reviewed by the Guardian. That “the way we built things in the past will no longer work”.
“We have to shift. There’s no question about it,” Dorsey said.
Some employees, including Mark, feel that the workers are being tasked with manufacturing and training the same equipment the company is trying to use to replace them.
“The way they’re using these tools as justification to fire half the company is ridiculous,” he said. “Ultimately, it seemed to be a veiled effort to get all this input from employees about what tasks to automate. You basically have employees teaching you how to automate them… but (these tools) are not even close to making someone’s job ubiquitous.” Another fired Block employee said similar things publicly in an interview business insider.
Even Block employees whose jobs heavily involve AI tools are skeptical that existing tools can replace workers on this scale. “We’re not there yet,” says John, a current employee whose role involves helping other employees use AI.
“There’s a difference between what’s technically possible and what’s justifiable—pardon my French—whatever bullshit a CEO will do, based on his own interpretation of how AI works,” says John.
While AI tools have certainly made engineers faster, humans still need to be part of the loop. Block officials recently said earnings call The company has seen “engineering work that would otherwise take weeks to complete can be accomplished in a much shorter time by a small team with agentive coding tools”. He cited “an increase of over 40% in production code shipped per engineer since September.”
According to John, all code changes in Block require human approval before they are added to products and services. He notes that about 95% of AI-driven code changes still require human changes – up from about three months ago. “They don’t meet company standards on the first try,” he says.
According to multiple employees, the block is also monitoring everything from the use of AI by employees to the use of specific tools and tokens. Evaluations about employee performance, which are partly determined by direct manager assessments, now include questions about the use and efficiency of AI.
Liam, a recently laid-off software engineer, felt pressured when his manager asked him how he currently uses AI and what steps he would take to make it more effective. “It was quite clear that if you weren’t using AI, your job was at risk,” he says.
According to John, who helps others use these tools, the rapid change has led to a widespread feeling of AI fatigue: “People are fed up with AI.”
Carl, a current employee, tells the Guardian he opposes AI on an ethical level because the datacenters powering it are harming communities. He avoids using these devices, saying: “You’re not paying me to train you on your devices, so I’m not going to do it.”
But even those who might otherwise have been more open to AI are disappointed. The pressure to use AI “created more friction as it became clear that our usage was being monitored, and we were being told we had to use it”, even though it was a less efficient route to completing a task, according to Oliver, a recently fired employee. Oliver and other employees told the Guardian that the block’s AI tools still can’t lead some work in heavily regulated spaces like banking and money transfers, which are critical parts of a financial technology company’s business.
Naoko Takeda, a data scientist at Block-owned Cash App, recently wrote in a viral post on LinkedIn this week that He Survived the sortie but experienced “extreme fear and survivor guilt”. He said that despite offering dramatic pay increases to the remaining employees, they left the company.
“In the past year, AI was shoved down everyone’s throats. Everything was about AI. We were told to use AI as little as possible,” he wrote. “This is nothing short of being forced to employ tools that accelerate the disappearance of the jobs on which our livelihoods depend. Personally, I have seen very limited gains in productivity from AI, nothing deep enough to justify ousting half a company’s workforce with their institutional knowledge and expertise.”
Are bots bad for business?
Apart from the impact on employees, the bloc’s AI expansion could also harm its business. George, who still works at the company, explains how some customers have become angry at outsourcing some of the initial requests for customer support to chatbots.
“We’ve seen (from internal surveys) that (these bots) have made incredible mistakes,” he says. This includes asking customers to cancel or close their existing accounts as possible solutions. “This is something that, of course, we never want to encourage as a solution,” he says.
More broadly, workers described that, although AI can be particularly helpful on the backend, customers and clients generally do not like talking to automated bots when they have serious problems. Carl says, “It’s frustrating, like, you can’t get your point across… It’s almost like it’s reading you a manual, and it’s like, OK, that’s not the problem.”
Other employees appreciate the impact of AI on productivity, but note the lack of judgment and emotional intelligence. “It doesn’t have a conscience. It looks like it can build a brick building, but does that mean it understands architecture?” Oliver says.
Amid these issues, remaining employees have been left to pick up the slack, as entire teams have been decimated. Current employees describe being in “survival mode” and morale is “in the gutter.” An internal Slack message dated February 26, reviewed by the Guardian, from Block’s engineering lead, in which he expressed his gratitude to staff amid the layoffs, received a variety of emoji reactions from staff: hundreds of thumbs-downs, tomatoes, middle fingers and clown faces.
“I know everyone is still very scared as they realize their workload has quadrupled or 10xed and AI is not going to fix it,” says Oliver.
