In a week where the news gods have given us a cornucopia of stories, picking the biggest one is a fool’s game.
Is this Trump’s extraordinary state? The extraordinary Nvidia results fail to answer the questions of whether the enormous hyperscaler splurges will generate significant profits further down the line? Rising tensions between Iran and the US?
I’ll play the fool for a moment, because I think the news of a mid-sized tech payments company may have long-term tremors and be more of a social upheaval warning than any other story of the week.
Block, the $33 billion company rose in extended trading on Thursday after cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey, best known for co-founding Twitter, told the market he was laying off half of his workforce.
He wrote to shareholders that 4,000 of the 10,000 are being asked to leave or enter into negotiations. Again: that’s about it half His work force!
Block CFO Amrita Ahuja said the job cuts position the company for “our next phase of long-term growth.”
“We are choosing to change how we operate at a time when our business is accelerating and we see an opportunity to move faster with smaller, more talented teams using AI to automate more work,” Ahuja wrote.
Job cuts happen all the time, but Dorsey said it should be a wake-up call for everyone.
He said he expects other companies to similarly scrutinize their workforces as they see greater efficiency gains from “intelligence tools.”
Let that sink in: Dorsey expects other companies Similarly they scrutinize their employees They see more efficiency gains from “intelligence tools.”
“I believe that within the next year, most companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” he wrote.
Do the math: 10,000 jobs with just under 6,000 jobs replicated across industries across the nation, around the world.
So the new, growth company, not the old financial business, said that companies will cut huge swaths of their workforce as new intelligence tools spread.
I’ve been saying on CNBC that AI will create new jobs to replace lost jobs. I have been asking the same question for years. “What are those jobs? Where are the jobs for the millions of people who are going to make their roles redundant?”
And I hear the same old trope every time – “Oh those jobs haven’t been created yet.”
I guess it’s about time we got a better answer, don’t you?
(tags to be translated) Staff
