California-based financial services company Block is reducing its workforce from more than 10,000 workers to just under 6,000 due to increased utilization of artificial intelligence tools at the company, Block co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey said in a Feb. 26 post on X.

The workforce reduction means “over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation,” Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, now X, said.

“We’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. Our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.

“But something has changed. We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working, which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.”

Affected employees will receive 20 weeks’ salary plus one week of salary per year of their tenure with the company.

Departing workers will also get equity vested through the end of May, six months of health care, the corporate devices they have used, and $5,000 to help them with the transition, Dorsey said, adding that employees outside the United States will receive similar support.

In a letter to stockholders shared as part of the announcement of Block’s fourth quarter of 2025 earnings report on Thursday, Dorsey said cutting the workforce is the “right path” for the company.

The Block chairman suggested that other companies will eventually realize that pairing intelligence tools with smaller teams is the way to move forward.

“A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better,” he said.

“I don’t think we’re early to this realization. I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I'd rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively.”

Block offers various financial tools to customers, including the Afterpay app, which allows users to buy millions of products digitally or in-store and pay over time, and the Cash App, which enables users to send and receive money to family and friends for free.

For the fourth quarter, Block reported a 24 percent year-over-year increase in gross profits. For the entire 2025, gross profit rose by 17 percent from the previous year. Block share price jumped by 4.99 percent on Thursday to $54.53.

In October 2025, Amazon announced eliminating 14,000 corporate positions as part of a restructuring effort to cut down bureaucracy, flatten management layers, and redirect resources towards AI and other initiatives.

In a memo to employees, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, termed AI the “most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet.” The restructuring will free up capital and talent for Amazon’s “biggest bets,” particularly artificial intelligence, Galetti said.

In a Jan. 28 memo to employees, Galetti said the total number of terminated roles was updated to roughly 16,000.

AI Job Cuts

According to a Jan. 8 report by outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. employers announced more than 1.2 million job cuts in 2025, up by 58 percent from the previous year.

Artificial intelligence technologies were deemed responsible for 54,836 announced layoffs in 2025. Since 2023, when the company began tracking AI as a reason for layoffs, artificial intelligence has been cited in 71,825 job-cut announcements, the report said.

In a Feb. 5 report, Challenger, Gray & Christmas said American companies announced 108,435 job cuts in January, more than double the job cuts reported in the same month a year earlier.

“Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” Andy Challenger, the company’s workplace expert and chief revenue officer, said in a statement.

“It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less-than-optimistic about the outlook for 2026.

“It’s difficult to say how big an impact AI is having on layoffs specifically.

“We know leaders are talking about AI, many companies want to implement it in operations, and the market appears to be rewarding companies that mention it.”

In a Jan. 13 report, research and advisory company Forrester shared a more optimistic view of AI’s impact on the job market. While AI-led job disruption will escalate, fears of a job apocalypse are “overstated,” Forrester said.

Many companies that have announced AI-related layoffs do not have proper AI applications ready to fill the roles being terminated, the report said. The trend is called “AI washing,” in which financially motivated job cuts are attributed to future AI implementation.

Forrester predicted that only 6 percent of U.S. jobs will be automated by 2030. The company also predicted that AI will augment 20 percent of jobs over the next five years.

“We may not be heading for an imminent AI job apocalypse, but how organizations handle AI today will define more than just their future success,” said JP Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.

“To navigate the complexity around the human and AI era, leaders must prioritize governance and invest in their people—treating AI not as a replacement for human talent but as a tool to enhance it.”