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Block, the fintech group headed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, will cut its workforce by “nearly half” in one of the clearest signs of the sweeping changes AI tools are having on employment.
Shares in the payment company soared more than 25 per cent in after-hours trading on Thursday as it announced it would shed more than 4,000 jobs from its 10,000-strong workforce.
“Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company. We’re already seeing it internally,” Dorsey wrote in a letter to shareholders.
“A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week.”
Dorsey, who left his role as CEO of Twitter in 2021, is among the first Silicon Valley chiefs to explicitly tie huge job cuts to the ability of AI to replace human workers.
Amazon has sought to play down the link to AI after announcing lay-offs totalling 30,000 roles since October, months after CEO Andy Jassy warned the technology would mean “fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today” in the coming years, especially in white-collar roles.
Dorsey said he did not think he was early to the realisation about the affect that AI could have on work, but that “most companies are late”.
He said he expected a “majority of companies” would reach the same conclusion within the next year and make similar structural changes.
The staff reduction at Block comes as anxiety rises about AI leading to job losses across vast parts of the economy.
Investors and economists are grappling with an influx of US economic data and corporate announcements in an effort to gauge the impact AI could be having on the labour market. The latest non-farm payrolls figures were better than expected, suggesting the domestic jobs market was stabilising, but several big US companies have committed to cutting staff.
Amazon, UPS, Dow, Nike, Home Depot and others in late January announced they would be cutting a combined 52,000 jobs.
Dorsey said the cuts at Block, which owns the payment processor Square, came despite what he described as a “strong” financial performance in 2025.
Block has made a contrarian bet on bitcoin at a time when many payment companies favoured stablecoins: cash-like digital tokens that became regulated in the US last year.
Block’s strategy was spearheaded by Dorsey, a “bitcoin maximalist” who has said he believes the digital currency will eventually eclipse the dollar.
The company offers payment services in bitcoin for merchants and consumers — and suffered a loss on its own bitcoin holdings as the price of the cryptocurrency dropped 23 per cent this year.
In contrast, payment companies that made a bet on stablecoins experienced a boost. Stripe earlier this week said its stablecoins transaction volumes increased fourfold last year.
In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3bn, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234mn hit on its bitcoin holdings.