Most people think of Block as a fintech company. I've started thinking of them as an organisation design case study. Here's why that distinction matters for every People leader thinking about AI right now.
Hierarchy has always solved a real problem. Before digital systems, before AI, organisations needed a structured way to move information. Teams generated it. Managers interpreted it. Directors consolidated it. Executives received summaries and made decisions. Hierarchy wasn't just a reporting structure. It was the organisation's information system. And for decades, that worked. Information flowed upward, each layer added context and interpretation, and leadership made decisions based on what eventually reached them. The problem is that by the time information reached the top, it was slower, narrower and further from the source. Not because managers were failing. Because that's what happens when humans are the primary mechanism for moving organisational context.
What changes with AI isn't just efficiency. It's the underlying logic. When organisational work is digital and machine-readable - messages, documents, workflows, operational data - AI can sit across that environment and surface context directly. A leader can query the organisation in something closer to real time, without waiting for it to travel upward through layers of interpretation.
The organisation becomes queryable. Block appears to have asked: if that's true, what role does hierarchy now perform? The answer isn't that management disappears. It's that management shifts from moving information to exercising judgement, building capability, and holding accountability.
That is a fundamentally different workforce design question. And it's one that doesn't get answered by deploying an AI tool. It gets answered by deliberately redesigning the roles, structures and accountability frameworks around it.
Most organisations haven't started that conversation yet.
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