I Worked for Block. Its A.I. Job Cuts Aren’t What They Seem.

Mr. Zamost was the head of communications, policy and people at Square, now known as Block, from 2015 to 2020.

The texts poured in. “WOW.” “WILD.” “Bloodbath.” As the former head of communications, policy and people at Square, the company now known as Block, I knew what those messages meant without having seen the news.

Block stunned the tech world last week when it announced it was dismissing over 4,000 employees in a radical A.I.-driven restructuring. A.I. is “enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” declared Block’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, on Thursday. Later that day, workers sent thumbs-down emojis raining down their screens during the company’s all-hands video meeting and scrambled to figure out who had survived.

The question on minds everywhere: Is A.I. a terrifying new reality in which the work they do might no longer be viable? Or is Block’s announcement just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing?

The truth is, nobody knows the answer — not even Block itself. In a note to the staff, Jack, my old boss, acknowledged that some of the decisions about which roles were eliminated might turn out to be mistakes. That was not a small admission. One might think a company would want to move cautiously before laying off nearly half its work force. But that person doesn’t understand Silicon Valley generally, Jack specifically and the immense pressure on established tech companies to prove their A.I. credentials.

Silicon Valley is led by engineers. Jack, like many engineers-turned-leaders, sees the world largely through that lens. At a time when some A.I. coding tools have rapidly improved to become a real game-changer, it’s not a big logical leap for an engineering-minded leader to conclude that A.I. will rip through the rest of our work as well. Jack, who also co-founded what was then called Twitter, has long placed big bets based on a read of early signals. These layoffs, like his early adoption of Bitcoin and his decision to close offices at the onset of Covid before everyone else, show a tendency to identify patterns, see enormous growth as an inevitability and go all in with conviction.

A.I. may provide a new justification for layoffs, but the playbook is familiar. Silicon Valley executives have argued that tech companies are overstaffed because they expanded too much during the pandemic. Block itself had gone through rounds of layoffs in 2024, 2025 and again in February to fix the predictable fallout from earlier executive turf wars that led to teams being duplicated all over the organization. (This, in my view, is what led Block to triple its head count in four years.) Look closer at specific cuts — like shrinking the policy team and eliminating diversity and inclusion roles, former colleagues told me — and Block’s latest reorganization reads like standard prioritization and cost management, not an A.I.-driven reinvention.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

© The New York Times