On March 31, Block (formerly Square) founder Jack Dorsey and Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha published a joint essay titled "From Hierarchy to Intelligence", declaring that Block is undergoing a radical organizational restructuring. The goal: replace traditional middle management with AI and transform the company into a "micro-AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence).
Ending 2,000 Years of Hierarchy: AI Solves the Information Routing Problem
The essay traces the history of organizational structure — from the Roman army's "span of control" and the Prussian army's "general staff" to the modern org chart invented by 19th-century American railroads. For two millennia, companies added management layers to route information and coordinate actions, resulting in rigid decision-making and slow speed. Dorsey and Botha note that past flattening attempts by Spotify, Zappos, and Valve all failed because "there was no alternative to humans for information routing." Now, AI for the first time enables a system to maintain a comprehensive "world model" of the entire enterprise, rendering middle managers obsolete.
Building the Corporate Brain: Block's Four Pillars and World Model
Block proposes a new four-layer architecture: Capabilities — atomic financial modules like payments, lending, and card issuance, highly compliant but without standalone interfaces; World Model — split into a "Company World Model" (internal decisions, progress, resource allocation) and a "Customer World Model" (powered by millions of daily real transactions from Cash App and Square); Intelligence Layer — the system's brain that proactively identifies customer pain points and assembles solutions. For instance, if the system predicts a restaurant's seasonal cash crunch, it automatically pushes a short-term loan offer; Interfaces — end-user products like Square, Cash App, and TIDAL. This model eliminates the traditional product roadmap; unsolved customer pain points become the engineering team's next tasks automatically.
Reshaping the Workforce: Three Roles Replace Middle Management
With AI handling cross-department coordination and information routing, employee roles shift dramatically. Dorsey says future employees will operate at the "edge" of the system, handling intuition, moral judgment, high-stakes decisions, and interpersonal trust. Block's structure narrows to three roles: Individual Contributors (ICs) — deep experts building capabilities and intelligence models, acting autonomously with full context; Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs) — owners of specific cross-functional problems or customer outcomes, with authority to pull resources from any team; Player-Coaches — replacing pure managers, these individuals still write code or design products while mentoring teams, freed from status meetings and cross-department coordination.
AI Not Just for Cost-Cutting, But for Revealing True Moat
Dorsey admits Block is in the early stages of this transformation and expects pain and failures. However, he warns that companies using AI solely for layoffs and margin optimization will be devoured by smarter competitors. Real change comes when AI reveals and strengthens the company's core moat. For Block, that moat is the "economic graph" woven from millions of consumers and merchants. The essay serves as both an internal manifesto and a challenge to businesses worldwide: as machines gain the ability to manage and coordinate, how should human value be redefined?