Good morning. Block’s leaders didn’t want to sprinkle AI on top of existing work.
“We thought about fundamentally refactoring how we operate as a company,” Amrita Ahuja, Block’s CFO and COO, said during a panel I moderated at the
Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit on Tuesday in Santa Barbara, where she was joined by leaders from Synopsys, Cloudflare, and Amazon.
Over the past few years, the fintech company has been consolidating and simplifying its processes and using AI in the business since early 2024. Earlier this year, Block, the parent company of Square and Cash App, cut
its workforce by 40% and removed layers of management.
“We fundamentally believe that in a world of AI, you absolutely need the human at the center,” Ahuja said. You still need people in every function who are builders, goal-setters, and strategy deciders, she said. But you no longer need a person whose job is to pass information along or check work before it reaches the actual reviewer, she added.
At Block, engineers improved their code review changes by 150% between the start of the year and midyear, and “even non-engineers have a 60% improvement,” Ahuja said, adding that 15% of code changes are now almost fully automated—meaning “there’s only a human in the loop at the end for the final decision,” she said.
Measuring the return is still evolving, though. Much of the industry is still weighing AI costs against personnel savings, she said. Block is working to refine a metric it calls “timed customer value,” which would trace a code change to a feature, then to a customer interaction, and finally to value.
For Synopsys, a company that develops software for designing and verifying semiconductors, CFO Shelagh Glaser said the cost side got real fast. AI spending “was pretty reasonable until it wasn’t,” she said, comparing employees’ usage habits to snacks in the break room. Synopsys had to decide who gets premium tiers and who uses internal models. It also built its own metering system when some providers didn’t offer one. The goal is to be “super intentional about where that investment is,” with returns measured in customer outcomes, not just product releases.
Cloudflare co-founder and President Michelle Zatlyn, whose company provides web infrastructure and cybersecurity services, said the company now hires “both employees and agents” and wants all of its roughly 5,000 people to be builders across the business. One standout was a finance director who made extensive use of agents and whom the CFO tapped to lead AI transformation for the finance team, Zatlyn said. Cloudflare also committed to hiring more than 1,000 interns in 2026, and they’ve helped teams become more AI-native, she said.
“The important thing as a leader right now is to make sure that you’re giving time and space and permission for your teams to learn,” Heather Zorn, Amazon’s VP of customer experience, products, and services said. The company is able to measure returns on investment in how employees use AI through measuring adoption first, then engagement, and then efficiency through outcomes like time saved, Zorn said.
“You want to create something that wins for the customer, and then you have to find a way that it wins for the business as well,” she said. Leaders also have to figure out how long they’re willing to invest before seeing both wins, she added.
Ahuja said she expects more companies to integrate AI agents into their organizational charts, with workers responsible for both training and deploying these agents.
“Where things are headed—and I’ve already heard about a couple of companies doing this, so we’re on the frontier—is you look at your work chart that your company publishes, and it will have not only units, but agents,” she said. “Those agents, not too dissimilar to humans, need to be developed over time.”
Sheryl EstradaSheryl.Estrada@fortune.com
