Block's Bet: Can AI Replace the Information Layer?

Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha published "From Hierarchy to Intelligence" on 31 March 2026, weeks after Block announced it was cutting 4,000 employees, roughly 40 per cent of its workforce.

The essay served as a manifesto for a different kind of organisation, one built fundamentally around AI-driven decision-making and direct information flow.

The argument is provocative and worth taking seriously, even if you are sceptical about whether it will actually work.

Dorsey and Botha's core claim is deceptively simple. They argue that traditional organisational hierarchies exist primarily to route information.

A manager receives information from their team, synthesises it, and passes it up to their manager, who does the same. This information routing function was necessary when organisations couldn't process information faster than humans could relay it. But AI changes that calculus.

The distinction matters. Adding AI to existing structures is incremental. Building organisations around AI is transformational. Block is attempting the latter.

This transformational approach challenges the very foundation of how we think about work. If the primary role of management is to manage information flow, and AI can do that faster and more accurately, then the traditional management layer becomes a structural bottleneck.