Jack Dorsey is betting that the corporate org chart is a 2,000-year-old relic. On Long Strange Trip, he argued traditional hierarchies are military-religious holdovers built for human-scale communication. At Block, he's replacing them with AI.
Dorsey’s manifesto, 'From Hierarchy to Intelligence,' is now an active experiment. He sees every Slack message, email, code commit, and meeting recording as a trainable artifact. By feeding this data into models, the company constructs an intelligent, self-aware model of its own operations.
This turns AI from a productivity tool into the firm's central nervous system. The goal is a 'mini-AGI' that identifies patterns in failure and success no human executive could track. It allows any employee to query the company’s collective intelligence directly, bypassing managerial gatekeepers.
Jack Dorsey, Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO:
- We've gotten into structures that we've borrowed and iterated on a little bit over 2,000 years.
- Every single thing that we do creates some sort of artifact, whether it be a Slack message, an email, or a pull request for code.
Block’s internal transformation shows this isn't theoretical. According to Steve Lee on the Presidio Bitcoin Jam, the new structure has only three roles: Individual Contributor, Directly Responsible Individual, and Player-Coach. Traditional middle management is gone.
The company has already deployed BuilderBot, an AI agent integrated into Slack that lets employees query company data, generate SQL, and get recommended contacts. The system is designed to orchestrate people, not the other way around.
Dorsey’s vision reframes the existential AI debate. While others fear job displacement, he sees an architectural opportunity. The question isn't which tasks AI automates, but which outdated human structures it renders obsolete. The corporation itself becomes the AI.
The immediate test is Block's own pivot. If the model works, it offers a template for flattening any information-intensive organization. If it fails, it reveals the limits of machine intelligence in navigating human politics and incentive structures. Dorsey is effectively betting his company on the answer.
