Jack Dorsey Latest Long-Form Post: AI Will Do Away With “Middle Management,” and Block Is Shifting Into a “Micro-AGI” Company

Block (formerly Square) co-founder Jack Dorsey and Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha jointly published a long-form article titled “From Hierarchy to Intelligence” on March 31. The piece announces that Block is undergoing an aggressive organizational restructuring aimed at breaking the “pyramid hierarchy” that has endured from ancient Roman armies to the present, using AI to replace traditional middle management and turning the company into a “miniature AGI (artificial general intelligence).”
(Backgrounder: Jack Dorsey slashes Block’s workforce in half and bets on AI: your company is the next one—XYZ stock jumps 23%)
(Additional background: Jack Dorsey: the man who reshaped global communications—why he’s obsessed with Bitcoin?)

Table of Contents

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• Ending Two Thousand Years of Pyramids: AI Solves the “Information Delivery” Pain Point
• Building the Corporate Brain: Block’s Four Pillars and the “World Model”
• Reshaping the Workforce Structure: Eliminate Middle Management, Keep Three Roles
• AI Is Not Only About Optimizing Costs—it Reveals the True Nature of a Company

While most companies still view artificial intelligence (AI) as a “copilot” that boosts employee productivity, fintech giant Block is ready to carry out a more radical revolution. On March 31, Block founder Jack Dorsey and Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha jointly released a jaw-dropping article titled “From Hierarchy to Intelligence,” revealing how Block is using AI to reshape an organizational structure that has a 2,000-year history.

Ending Two Thousand Years of Pyramids: AI Solves the “Information Delivery” Pain Point

The article’s opening revisits the history of organizational structures: from ancient Roman armies’ “span of control,” to the Prussian army’s “staff (a prototype of middle management),” and then to the modern organizational chart invented by 19th-century U.S. railroad companies. Over the past two thousand years, as organizations have grown in size, companies have been forced to transmit information and coordinate actions by adding “management layers,” which inevitably leads to rigid decision-making and slower speed.

Dorsey and Botha point out that top Silicon Valley firms such as Spotify, Zappos, and Valve have all tried flattening management at one time or another, but ultimately often fall back to traditional hierarchies as they expand in scale. The reason is:

“In the past, there was no alternative that could replace humans for information routing.”

But now, AI changes everything. Block believes that for the first time, AI gives systems the ability to maintain a “world model” for the entire enterprise’s operations, thereby completely replacing the traditional role of middle managers passing information up and down.

Building the Corporate Brain: Block’s Four Pillars and the “World Model”

To make the company operate like a “miniature AGI,” Block proposes an entirely new set of four architectures:

2. Core Capabilities: Includes atomic financial foundation modules such as payments, lending, and card issuing. They have high compliance and reliability, but no standalone interfaces.
3. World Model: Divided into two parts. The “company world model” holds internal decision-making, progress, and resource allocation; the “customer world model” is based on hundreds of millions of real financial transaction data points from Cash App and Square each day (“the most honest signals”), accurately understanding customer behavior and needs.
4. Intelligence Layer: The system’s “brain.” It can proactively identify customer pain points and automatically combine the “core capabilities” into solutions. For example, when the system predicts a certain restaurant is about to face a seasonal cash-flow shortage, it will proactively push a short-tenor lending option to the merchant rather than waiting for the merchant to apply on its own.
5. Interfaces: End-user terminal products such as Square, Cash App, TIDAL, and others.

In this model, the traditional “product roadmap” led by product managers will be eliminated. Real customer pain points that the system cannot solve will automatically be generated as the next backlog item for the engineering team.

Reshaping the Workforce Structure: Eliminate Middle Management, Keep Three Roles

Since an AI system takes over cross-department coordination and information delivery, employees’ roles will also undergo a major transformation. Dorsey says that in the future, employees will be on the system’s “edge,” handling areas that AI cannot reach: intuition, moral judgment, high-risk decisions, and interpersonal trust.

Block’s future organizational structure will be simplified to the following three core roles:

• Individual Contributors (ICs): Deep specialists focused on building core capabilities and intelligence models. With the global context provided by the system, they can make independent decisions without waiting for instructions from superiors.
• Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs): People accountable for specific cross-department issues or customer outcomes. For example, addressing merchant churn within 90 days—they have the authority to pull the resources they need from other teams at any time.
• Player-coaches: Replacing traditional pure managers. They still personally write code or design products, and they are also responsible for team growth and coaching, but they no longer need to waste time on long meetings such as “progress reporting” and “cross-department coordination.”

AI Is Not Only About Optimizing Costs—it Reveals the True Nature of a Company

At the end of the piece, Dorsey acknowledges that Block is currently in the early stages of this transformation and will inevitably encounter pain points and failures along the way. But they are convinced that if a company introduces AI only to “cut headcount and optimize profits,” it will ultimately be swallowed by smarter competitors; real change is to let AI reveal and strengthen a company’s core defensive moats.

For Block, that moat is an “economic map” woven together by millions of consumers and merchants. This long-form article is not only an internal declaration for Block, but also puts a serious proposition to enterprises around the world: when machines gain the ability to manage and coordinate, how should human value in companies be redefined?