Jack Dorsey Wants to Abolish Managers: 'AI Should Replace Corporate Hierarchies'

Jack Dorsey speaks out again following the mass layoffs at Block with a statement destined to stir debate: according to the founder of Twitter and Square, artificial intelligence should not only replace workers but should directly eliminate corporate hierarchy. This radical vision comes about a month and a half after the announcement of 4,000 layoffs at the end of February.

Dorsey stated that traditional management structures, with their levels of middle management, endless meetings, and decision-making processes slowed down by internal bureaucracy, are now outdated in the AI era. In his view, AI models today are capable of performing many of the coordination and supervision functions that are typically assigned to middle managers within companies. In fact, new technologies would render the entire hierarchical structure on which large corporations rely superfluous.

This is not an isolated stance: Dorsey built the entire narrative around the cuts at Block on this premise. When the 40% workforce reduction was announced in February, the CEO explicitly pointed to AI as both the cause and solution. He promised a leaner, faster, and more competitive company. The market responded enthusiastically, causing the stock to soar by over 20% in a single session.

Now, Dorsey goes further and outlines an almost utopian (or dystopian, depending on one’s perspective) vision where future companies will be flat, decentralized, and led by AI systems instead of executives. This model somewhat resembles the philosophy of crypto-native organizations and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), in which Block is deeply rooted through its Bitcoin and TBD divisions.

Dorsey’s statements did not arise from an interview but from a blog post published on Sequoia Capital’s website, co-signed with Roelof Botha, a partner at the same venture capital firm. The essay, titled "From Hierarchy to Intelligence," is a lengthy manifesto in which the two authors argue that corporate hierarchical structures have remained essentially unchanged for over two thousand years (from the Roman contubernium to modern corporations) for one reason: the human limitation of the "span of control," a term used to denote a leader's inability to effectively coordinate more than 3-8 people at a time. With AI, Dorsey and Botha write, this limitation falls, along with the entire justification for the existence of middle management.

The reactions from the tech community have predictably polarized. On one hand, many investors and supporters of tech-solutionism applaud the vision; on the other hand, experts in corporate organization and unions point out that reducing management to "eliminable inefficiency" ignores the human value of leadership, corporate culture, and conflict management—skills that current language models are still far from reliably replicating.

The question many are asking is whether Dorsey's is a genuine strategic belief or a narrative constructed retrospectively to justify a restructuring driven mainly by financial reasons. One thing is certain: in an era where every mass layoff is rebranded as an "AI transformation," Block has become the most cited and controversial case study.