Exclusive: Block’s CFO explains the AI leaps over 18 months that led to the decision to slash nearly half its workforce 

Why now, and why so many people?

Those were the two questions whipping around the business world following Block’s shocking announcement that it was slashing 4,000 jobs, or nearly half its workforce. The parent company of Square and Cash App reported Q4 gross profits of $2.9 billion, up 24% year over year. Its shares jumped almost 20% in the trading sessions on Feb. 26 following the earnings release and the announcement of a major workforce reduction.But if the company is profitable and growing, why cut jobs now? “We believe that it is actually from a position of strength that we have the ability to take an action like this with confidence and execute on it in a way that continues to deliver for our customers and stakeholders,” Amrita Ahuja, CFO and COO at Block, told Fortune.

The decision to cut almost half of the workforce was part of a longer transformation rather than a sudden reaction to market pressure, Ahuja said. “This is a two-year journey for us,” she said. “This was not an overnight decision.”

Ahuja describes the move as the culmination of a push to embed AI deeply across the company. Block’s internal use of AI has already made its workforce more productive and helped support the company’s decision to raise its 2026 guidance even as it reduces headcount, she said.

Central to that strategy is codename goose, Block’s internally built AI agent that sits on top of large language models to execute actions, draft emails, and automate workflows. Goose has been in production internally for about 18 months and has been open-sourced, allowing other companies to experiment with it as well, Ahuja said. Since September, she added, developer productivity at Block has improved with a 40% increase per engineer use of AI tools to push code and features to........

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