Jack Dorsey is the co-founder and CEO of Block (Square / Cash App) (formerly Square) and the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. At Block he has advanced an AI-driven organizational flattening, cited as a corporate example of the Intelligence Replaces Hierarchy thesis — the argument that abundant AI capability lets organizations remove middle-management layers and widen spans of control.
Block organizational flattening
Following a roughly 40% workforce reduction, Block moved to engineering-manager spans of control of up to about 175 direct reports, replaced traditional management titles with "directly responsible individuals" (DRIs) and "player-coaches," and set the stated goal of having all of roughly 6,000 employees report directly to Dorsey, "minus the management layers" (Source: block.xyz) (Source: theguardian.com). A statement attributed to Dorsey and Botha (Block, May 2026) put the framing as "There is no need for a permanent middle management layer."
These moves position Block as an operational test of the argument that AI substitutes for the coordination and information-routing work middle management historically performed. The case is discussed alongside Brian Armstrong and Coinbase as a parallel example of a CEO concentrating organizational decision-making, and alongside reporting on AI eroding managerial signaling (the Guardian manager-purge reporting; the WSJ ChatGPT grade-inflation thread).
These descriptions are corporate self-descriptions and claims rather than validated outcomes.