Block, a financial technology company led by Jack Dorsey, will lay off 4,000 employees, cutting its team size by almost half. The company is betting that artificial intelligence (AI) will redesign the future of productivity at work and wants to anticipate this change.
Block has been changing its business model and downsizing teams since 2024, at a time when its actions have lagged behind its competitors. At the same time, the company began to invest heavily in AI tools to gain efficiency, including the development of its own solution, called Goose.
The new staff cut, announced in a letter to shareholders on Thursday, comes after a sequence of specific layoffs, many of them linked to annual performance reviews.
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“We are making a bold and very tough decision, but we are doing it from a position of strength,” said Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Amrita Ahuja, in an interview with Bloomberg. “We are reorganizing ourselves in a way that, in our view, will allow the company to move even faster to serve customers.”
The announcement was well received by the market: Block shares rose 22% in trading after the close of trading.
The company’s move is yet another sign of the impact that new AI tools have been having on the economy and financial markets, accelerating cost cuts and restructuring.
In the letter, Block highlighted the performance of 2025, with gross profit growth that more than doubled between the first and fourth quarters.
Dorsey, the company’s co-founder, said that the company once again accelerated the growth of the user base of the peer-to-peer payments app Cash App, expanded the scale of credit products and boosted the volume processed by Square. In 2025, Block recorded a gross profit of US$10.36 billion, an increase of 17% compared to the previous year.
According to the executive, employees were informed about the layoffs on Thursday. He said he believes that other companies will end up following the same path because of the advancement of AI.
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“I don’t think we’re ahead of the curve on this perception,” Dorsey wrote. “I think most companies are behind. Within a year, I believe most of them will reach the same conclusion and promote similar structural changes. I prefer to get there transparently and on our own terms, rather than being pushed into it reactively.”
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