Block Co-Founder Foresees AI Doing Middle Management Tasks 

Jack Dorsey is making a concrete bet that artificial intelligence can replace what middle managers have done in large organizations for generations. Block’s chief executive, writing jointly with lead independent director Roelof Botha, has outlined a structural transformation in which AI takes on work currently handled by layers of human management. 

That means moving information, tracking progress and generating real-time operational visibility across the entire business, without a manager in the middle. The case they make starts with a critique of hierarchy itself. Management layers were designed to solve an information problem. In large organizations, someone has to gather data, relay it upward and translate decisions back down. 

Dorsey and Botha believe that rationale has expired as artificial intelligence can now monitor all initiatives, reveal resource deployment patterns and identify successful efforts without requiring human go-betweens at each organizational level. Management layers, they argued, slow information down rather than move it efficiently. 

Block’s announcement coincides with the company eliminating approximately 4,000 positions through a major overhaul linked to artificial intelligence’s expanding presence. Instead of merely automating discrete functions, the firm is constructing what executives call an organizational intelligence managing coordination and revealing opportunities without human oversight. 

This platform would handle the information circulation that presently demands multiple supervisory tiers. Coordination would operate continuously through automated systems rather than through scheduled meetings and periodic status updates. 

Human roles in this model are deliberately distinct from traditional management. Employees would be reorganized into three distinct types, with some building and maintaining products and systems, and others assuming complete accountability for particular challenges and initiatives. A third group provides guidance to teammates while remaining deeply involved in hands-on technical or product work. 

The coordination layer that historically sat between frontline workers and senior leadership would not be replaced by different humans in new job titles. It would be handed to the AI system. 

Dorsey and Botha pushed back against the interpretation that this makes people peripheral. They argued that judgment calls on values, ethics and strategy cannot be handed to a machine regardless of how capable AI systems become. The most consequential decisions will continue to require human reasoning and accountability. 

People would operate where ambiguity and consequence are highest, while the AI manages the operational machinery underneath. Acknowledging that the model is unproven and the path toward it messy, Dorsey and Botha framed the shift as genuinely significant. What they are proposing is structuring operations around an intelligence platform instead of conventional management tiers, representing a fundamentally new organizational concept. 

If it holds at scale, the implications would reach well beyond Block. Given that the company has already restructured thousands of jobs around this premise, the experiment is well underway whether the theory ultimately holds or not. With more disruptive technologies like quantum computing being developed by enterprises like D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS), the employment landscape could undergo further transformation in the coming years. 

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