You saw the stock, right?
Up 23% after Block’s founder – you probably know it as Square – announced he cut 4,000 jobs overnight due to “intelligence tools,” which basically means he can do more with less.
He’s not afraid to say it either. Although we’ve been seeing mass layoffs left and right over the past 12 months, Dorsey might be the first – or one of the first – Fortune 500 leaders to explicitly say they are cutting jobs because of AI. Other companies have danced around the subject, citing culture and restructuring and blah blah blah, but we all know the deal.
And so do all the folks who recently got laid off – it’s not a coincidence.
It’s simple…
These public companies all have pressure to grow and Block has proven that laying off a hoard of people not only doesn’t negatively impact the stock, it can grow it by almost 25% instantly. Not to mention the allure of massively cutting operating expenses.
But let’s go deeper than that, because the avalanche metaphor isn’t just about one company inspiring another. It’s about the structural pressure that just shifted across every boardroom in America simultaneously.
Here’s what actually happened when that stock jumped 23%: Dorsey didn’t just reward his own shareholders. He handed every activist investor, every board member, every CFO at every public company a loaded argument. You can almost hear the conversations happening right now – “If Block can cut 40% of its people, grow gross profit 17%, and watch the stock surge overnight, what exactly is our justification for not doing the same?”
That’s not a rhetorical question. That’s a board agenda item.
And it compounds fast. When Amazon cut 30,000 corporate jobs, other companies watched. When Salesforce cut 5,000 and said AI handles half their customer interactions now, other companies watched. When Chegg eliminated 45% of their workforce, other companies watched. Each one of those moves was a data point. Dorsey just turned a collection of data points into a mandate.
The other thing that makes this feel like the top of a slope rather than a isolated event is the math that every CFO can now run with confidence. Before Block, you could argue the jury was still out – maybe the productivity gains weren’t real, maybe the stock market would punish you for the optics of mass layoffs, maybe customers would revolt.
Klarna tried AI, quality dropped, they had to rehire people. That was a cautionary tale companies could hide behind.
Dorsey just kicked that cautionary tale out the window. His business is strong. Gross profit is growing. Customers aren’t revolting. And investors handed him a 23% gain the same day he announced it. That is the playbook, proven and validated, sitting on the desk of every public company executive in the country right now.
There is one more layer to this that doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s not just that companies will cut people – it’s that they’ll stop hiring them in the first place. The avalanche isn’t only layoffs. It’s a fundamental repricing of what a human hour of work is worth, and a restructuring of what companies are willing to pay for it. Entry level hiring at big tech is already down more than 50% over the last three years. Graduate job postings dropped 43% in the US since 2022. The avalanche started quietly, from the bottom up, before Dorsey made it loud.
Now it’s loud.
And here is where it gets real for the rest of us.
This isn’t just a tech story. Block owns Square – the payment system sitting on the counter at your local coffee shop, your favorite boutique, the HVAC company down the street. This is Main Street infrastructure run by a company that just told Wall Street that nearly half its people were unnecessary. And investors loved it.
So what happens next? Every CFO at every public company is sitting in a board meeting right now running the same math. If Dorsey can cut 40% of his people, watch his stock jump 23%, and do it while the business is *growing* – why wouldn’t they? The pressure to follow suit isn’t subtle. It’s existential. Boards are going to start asking hard questions, and CEOs who don’t have answers are going to start feeling very uncomfortable very fast.
You don’t have 10,000 people to cut and a board breathing down your neck about AI efficiency ratios. But you’re feeling the squeeze from every other direction – customers who expect more for less, competitors who are getting leaner by the month, and Cost with a capital “C” that doesn’t need any explanation if you’ve looked at your interest payments or your vendor invoices lately.
Here’s the thing about companies your size though – you’re actually more adaptable than Block. You don’t have 10,000 people to retrain, 47 departments to restructure, or a shareholder letter to write. You can make a decision this week and feel it next week.
And you will adapt. Companies always do – and a big reason why we launched LevelDo Pros a year ago given how hard that adaptation is.
Some will lean into AI tools to augment what their people are already doing – not replace them, just make them faster and more effective. Some will actually go the other direction and make “we’re a human-first business” their competitive positioning – and honestly, for the right market and the right customer, that’s a legitimate play. And some, unfortunately, will wait too long, move too slow, and get squeezed out. That’s not cynicism. That’s just how free markets have always worked.
The avalanche Dorsey triggered isn’t just a layoff story. It’s a productivity reset – and it’s happening whether we like it or not.
The question isn’t really whether AI is going to change how your business operates. It’s already doing that, with or without your permission. The real question is how you balance the opposing forces pulling at your business right now – the pressure to modernize against the reality of running lean, the allure of efficiency against the risk of moving too fast on technology that isn’t always ready for prime time.
Will you be proactive and test the waters carefully, or pick a side and go full steam ahead? There’s no universally right answer here. But what’s clear is that the mountain is already moving. The snow is already shifting. The only dangerous place to be right now is standing still in the middle of the slope, hoping it passes over you.
