Block cuts nearly half its staff as CEO pins layoffs on AI; shares jump 24%
Block has moved to slash nearly half its workforce in a restructuring the company’s CEO tied directly to artificial intelligence, a shift that coincided with the company’s shares rising about 24%. The personnel reduction — more than 4, 000 people — has immediate human consequences and underscores how rapidly AI tools are reshaping roles inside the company.
Block's workforce and stock reaction
The company eliminated roughly half of its staff, trimming a headcount that amounted to more than 4, 000 affected employees. Leadership framed the cuts as rooted in AI-driven changes to business operations, and the stock market responded with a roughly 24% rally as the company disclosed the workforce reduction.
Ivan Ureña-Valdes's experience
Ivan Ureña-Valdes, a data analyst who had been at Block for nearly four years, described being notified by email from CEO Jack Dorsey while he was interviewing a candidate for a role at the company. The timing was jarring: in earlier rounds of layoffs, staffers’ access had typically been cut almost immediately; in this instance his access remained active long enough that a coworker messaged him, "Hey, are you okay?" — a message that made his heart race and confirmed his expectation that he was being let go.
He had to pause the interview and tell the candidate he had been laid off and would likely be unable to submit feedback, and urged them to contact their recruiter. He is the sole provider for his family, and he described the moment as very tough. He said he had survived three prior rounds of layoffs at Block — some companywide, some focused on engineering — and that this latest cut was not related to performance.
Jack Dorsey's AI rationale
Ureña-Valdes said he appreciated that Jack Dorsey was blunt about the reason for the reduction: that it was driven by AI and part of a broader vision the CEO sees for the company. He interpreted the scale and secrecy of the move — more than 4, 000 people cut without broad prior warning — as evidence that decisions were taken at the highest levels of the organization. He also noted he received generous severance and benefits, which he said softened the immediate financial impact.
Anthropic's Opus 4. 5 and daily tooling
Ureña-Valdes recounted a growing awareness of AI’s reach inside Block that accelerated after Anthropic launched Opus 4. 5 late last year. He said Jack Dorsey loved AI and had been constantly pushing teams to adopt it; Ureña-Valdes himself used AI tools every day. That steady exposure, he said, made it clear how quickly routine analytical work could be accelerated or replaced.
Data analyst tasks automated
He laid out how core steps of a data analyst’s workflow had been transformed: finding the right dataset, writing code or queries to pull that dataset, and generating usable output. Each of those steps, he said, has become significantly faster and easier because of AI — a development that, in his view, made the layoffs predictable even if their timing was not. "It was definitely a 'whoa' moment when I realized just how powerful things had gotten, " he said.
Ureña-Valdes also noted that other performance-based cuts at the company had largely finished prior to this round, and that he had no indication this particular reduction was coming. He had been working on two large projects — projects he described as probably the largest he had undertaken since joining Block — when he received the notice.
What makes this notable is how quickly internal adoption of AI tools translated to strategic decisions about personnel: Ureña-Valdes saw the automation unfolding in his daily tasks, leadership connected that automation to a major workforce reduction, and investors reacted within the same disclosure window with a roughly 24% stock surge. The combination of rapid technological uptake and abrupt organizational change highlights the immediate operational and personal consequences of AI-driven transformation at the company.
