Billionaire Block founder Jack Dorsey suggests radically reshaping manager roles in the age of AI

In February, billionaire Block (XYZ) founder and CEO Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of his workforce as part of an AI-driven efficiency push.

A string of job cuts followed. Tech execs fine-tuned their slide decks in subsequent management meetings, then uncorked headline-making mass layoff announcements of their own, blaming AI for reducing headcount.

The former Twitter founder is back with more news as tech firms eye further AI-driven efficiency gains.

The news: Dorsey says he isn’t done removing management layers at Block and changing the job requirements of a modern-day manager.

“So like right now … we're about five layers deep. I would love to get that down to two to three by the end of the year,” Dorsey said at a JPMorgan conference on Tuesday. He was referencing the number of organizational layers beneath him.

Dorsey said that in the future, managers should be assigned to groups of potentially hundreds of people rather than to a single team. “You’re focused on helping [workers] get to mastery of their discipline and helping them think through their career and like how to think about problems and see around corners … but you don't have to like tell them what to do. You can show them how to do it.”

As a start, “in engineering last year, we moved from a world of having pure managers to the requirement that every manager must be technical and they must contribute code. And that was just one step, and we need to do that throughout the organization for all of our other disciplines as well.”

What Dorsey is suggesting is a radically lean operating structure for a public company to speed up idea creation and execution. Plus, a completely reinvented role for managers.

Read more: Worried about job security? Take these 5 steps now to protect your finances.

2026, the year of the mass tech company layoff: The growing impact of AI is not just seen at Block this year, but also at Amazon (AMZN), Oracle (ORCL), Coinbase (COIN), Cloudflare (NET), and Meta (META).

With billionaire founder Larry Ellison still pulling the strings, Oracle reportedly laid off up to 30,000 workers across the US, Mexico, and other countries on April 1. Amazon has reportedly slashed 16,000 workers this year as part of its AI efficiency push.

Coinbase is fresh off announcing a 14% reduction in force this month. Cloudflare just cut bait with 20% of its workforce. And Meta is in the process of cutting 10% of its employee count.

Circle (CRCL) co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire recently doubled down on his call that we are just at the start of AI agents reshaping the US workforce.