Block Slashes Its Workforce as It Goes All in on AI

Block is cutting its headcount by more than 40%, the company announced late Thursday during its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call. The move—which will leave Block with less than 6,000 employees, down from more than 10,000—comes as the fintech posted one of its best financial performances for 2025, according to company officials.

The staff reductions are driven by Block’s growing use of artificial intelligence, technology that has become more powerful and sophisticated over the past year, Block chief executive Jack Dorsey told analysts during the call. 

Dorsey also described the workforce reduction as a “choice” by Block to reposition the company for future growth. “A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better,” he said. “Intelligence-tool capabilities are compounding faster every week.” San Francisco-based Block owns and operates a number of payments services, including Square, Cash App, and the Afterpay buy now, pay later platform.

Dorsey hinted Block should have acted sooner in anticipating its needs in what the company sees as a rapidly evolving payments-technology landscape. “I don’t think we’re early to this realization. I think most companies are late,” Dorsey said. “Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I’d rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively.”

Block’s commitment to AI means the technology will “be at the core” of how the company works, makes decisions, builds products and trust, manages risk, and serves customers, Dorsey said. “We’re moving toward a model where our customers can build their own features directly on top of our capabilities,” he said. “That changes the nature of what we are as a company, and it dramatically increases the value we can deliver per customer.”

AI’s second benefit is that it will bring “extreme focus” to Block, Dorsey said. The company, he said, will now focus on four things: customer capabilities; interfaces where Block can compose and deliver those capabilities; early intelligence based on Block’s real-time data; and an intelligence model to orchestrate operations. “This allows us to best serve the master plan” the company laid out at an investor- day event last year, Dorsey said.

The third expected benefit is speed. “A company of our new size has no excuse for being slow,” Dorsey said in a letter to shareholders. “We will decide faster, ship faster, and learn faster. The structure we’re building is designed for that. We believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster, intelligence-native company. Everything we do from here is in service of that.”

Block posted a strong result in 2025. Cash App, Block’s 13-year-old peer-to-peer money transfer service, finished the year with 59 million monthly active users across the United States, up from 57 million in 2024. Active users brought $316 billion in inflows into Cash App last year, up from $284 billion in 2024. During the fourth quarter, monthly active Cash App users brought in an average of $1,410 in inflows, up from $1,261 a year earlier. Block defines active users as those making at least one financial transaction within Cash App monthly.

Cash App’s consumer-loan origination volume grew 69% year-over-year during the fourth quarter, and more than twofold for the year. Propelling the growth was Block’s effort to scale Cash App Borrow to “new customer cohorts through Cash App Green and increased Afterpay Post-Purchase attach rates,” the company said in its letter to shareholders. Cash App Green is a monthly rewards program.

The food and beverage category was Block’s strongest vertical during the fourth quarter, with gross product value growing 16% year-over-year. Churn within the category was at one of the lowest levels observed since 2019, the company said. “We believe that what worked in food and beverage is repeatable, and we plan to take our go-to-market approach and product strategy deeper into other verticals in 2026 and beyond,” Block said in its shareholder letter.

Overall, Block posted gross profit of $2.87 billion for the fourth quarter, up 24% from a year earlier. Cash App’s gross profit totaled $1.83 billion, a 33% year-over-year increase, while gross profit for Square totaled $993 million, up 7%.