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Research & Insights
AI won't kill jobs. It will redistribute them. And that changes everything.
A response to Jack Dorsey's decision to cut nearly half of Square's workforce, and what it actually signals about the future of work.
A response to Jack Dorsey's decision to cut nearly half of Square's workforce, and what it actually signals about the future of work.
Jack Dorsey just announced he’s cutting Block’s workforce from over 10,000 to just under 6,000. Nearly half the company, gone in a single day. His reasoning was direct: AI and smaller, flatter teams are enabling a fundamentally different way of building and running a company, and he’d rather act now than bleed slowly.
The internet, predictably, split into two camps. One side says this is the inevitable future — AI replaces humans, and we should all brace for mass unemployment. The other side says this is corporate greed dressed up in a technology narrative.
I think both are wrong. What’s actually happening is more nuanced, more structural, and ultimately more optimistic than either camp admits — though the path there won’t be painless.
Let’s be honest about something the tech industry has avoided saying out loud for years: large organizations are bloated. Not because leadership is incompetent, but because scale itself creates inefficiency. When you have 10,000 people, you don’t just have 10,000 workers — you have layers of coordination, approval chains, internal communication overhead, and entire teams that exist primarily to manage the complexity created by having so many teams in the first place.
AI doesn’t just automate individual tasks. It collapses the coordination cost that justified many of those roles. When an AI agent can summarize a 40-page document, draft a response, route it to the right stakeholder, and track follow-ups — you no longer need the three people whose job was essentially to be connective tissue between departments.
So yes, Dorsey is right. Large enterprises will compress headcount, and significantly. But here’s the part most people miss: this dynamic is largely confined to organizations that had the slack to absorb it. The fat exists at scale. A 50-person company doesn’t have three layers of middle management. They don’t have a team of six whose primary job is internal reporting. They were already lean.
For small and mid-sized businesses, AI tells a completely different story. These companies were never overstaffed — they were understaffed. They were already doing more with less, often competing against larger players with a fraction of the resources.
AI changes that equation dramatically. A 30-person company with the right AI infrastructure can now produce the output of a 100-person company. A 200-person company can compete with enterprises ten times their size — not by hiring more people, but by multiplying the capability of every person they already have.
This is the part of the AI story that doesn’t get enough attention: AI levels the competitive playing field. Not completely — capital, brand, and distribution still matter — but meaningfully. The gap between what a small team can accomplish and what a large organization can accomplish is narrowing faster than at any point in the history of business.
Headcount is becoming decoupled from output. Revenue per employee will become the defining metric of the next decade, and small, AI-native companies are going to set records that would have been unthinkable five years ago.
This is where the conversation gets most important, and where I think the prevailing narrative is most wrong.
The assumption embedded in the “AI kills jobs” argument is that when large enterprises lay people off, those people have nowhere to go. That the economy is a fixed pie, and if big companies need fewer humans, there are simply fewer jobs to be had.
History tells us the opposite. Every major technology shift — the printing press, electricity, the internet — initially displaced workers from established institutions. And every time, it simultaneously lowered the barrier to creating new institutions.
AI is doing this right now, at an unprecedented pace. The cost and complexity of starting a business is collapsing. What used to require a team of 20 — engineers, designers, marketers, customer support — can now be bootstrapped by three or four people with the right AI tools. Product development cycles that took 18 months can happen in 18 weeks. A solo founder can build, ship, and support a product that would have required venture funding and a full team just five years ago.
This means we’re about to see an explosion of new businesses. Micro-businesses, niche SaaS companies, specialized agencies, AI-native service firms. And those businesses will need experienced people — exactly the kind of people being laid off from large enterprises. People who understand how to operate at scale, how to manage complex products, how to serve demanding customers. That institutional knowledge doesn’t disappear. It redistributes.
I would be doing you a disservice if I made this sound clean and seamless. It won’t be.
The timing mismatch is real. Layoffs happen in a single announcement. New business creation takes months, sometimes years. In between, there are real people facing real financial pressure, uncertainty, and the psychological toll of an involuntary career disruption. The macro trend being positive doesn’t make the micro experience any less difficult.
Not everyone will become a founder, and they shouldn’t have to. Many of the people leaving large enterprises want — and deserve — stable employment with benefits, predictable income, and career growth. The emerging ecosystem of smaller companies will eventually provide this, but it will take time for that infrastructure to mature.
And we should acknowledge that large enterprises won’t just shrink and retreat. They’ll become leaner, faster, and potentially more dominant with fewer people. Dorsey isn’t downsizing because Block is struggling — he’s restructuring to accelerate. The competitive pressure on smaller companies could actually intensify before the leveling effect of AI fully plays out.
Here’s the thesis I want to leave you with.
We’re not heading toward a world with fewer jobs. We’re heading toward a world where employment is distributed differently. For decades, the trajectory has been toward concentration — large enterprises absorbing more and more of the workforce, becoming the default employer for millions. AI reverses that trend.
The future of employment looks less like 50 people working at one massive company and more like 50 people working across 10 companies — each one leaner, more focused, and more capable than would have been possible before AI. The total number of jobs may stay roughly the same, or even grow, but they’ll be spread across a much larger number of organizations.
This is, I believe, ultimately a healthier economic structure. More companies means more competition, more innovation, more resilience, and more paths to building wealth. It means fewer people dependent on a single employer’s decisions — like, say, a CEO deciding over a weekend to cut 4,000 jobs.
If you’re running a large organization, the lesson from Dorsey’s announcement isn’t necessarily to follow his exact playbook. But you should be asking hard questions about which roles exist because of genuine value creation and which exist because of organizational complexity. AI won’t just let you do the same things with fewer people — it will let you do entirely different things with a fundamentally different team structure.
If you’re running a small or mid-sized company, this is your moment. AI is your equalizer. The companies that will thrive aren’t the ones that use AI to cut costs — they’re the ones that use it to expand what’s possible with the team they already have.
And if you’re one of the 4,000 people leaving Block today — or anyone watching this unfold and wondering about their own future — understand this: the economy is not shrinking. It’s reshaping. Your skills, your experience, your ability to build and execute — those things are about to be in demand in places that didn’t exist two years ago.
The jobs aren’t disappearing. They’re moving.
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Lucidya is the leading platform for customer experience management in the Arab World. With unique AI and NLU capabilities, this CXM platform is designed to give brands the power to deliver game-changing customer experiences anywhere in the region.
Lucidya is the leading platform for customer experience management in the Arab World. With unique AI and NLU capabilities, this CXM platform is designed to give brands the power to deliver game-changing customer experiences anywhere in the region.
Lucidya is the leading platform for customer experience management in the Arab World. With unique AI and NLU capabilities, this CXM platform is designed to give brands the power to deliver game-changing customer experiences anywhere in the region.
Lucidya is the leading platform for customer experience management in the Arab World. With unique AI and NLU capabilities, this CXM platform is designed to give brands the power to deliver game-changing customer experiences anywhere in the region.
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