THE FINANCIAL SERVICES and technology company Block, which has an office in Ireland, is set to lay off nearly half of its staff worldwide and replace them with AI.

The company’s chairman and co-founder Jack Dorsey, who also co-founded Twitter, made the announcement in a letter sent to staff yesterday which he also posted online.

Dorsey said that Block would reduce its headcount from over 10,000 to just under 6,000 and described the decision as one of the hardest in the history of the company.

Employees will learn immediately whether they will be staying, entering consultation or asked to leave.

“We’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. Our business is strong,” Dorsey said in a post on X.

“Gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving,” he said.

“But something has changed. We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. And that’s accelerating rapidly.”

The company’s stock price jumped when the announcement of the layoffs was made.

Dorsey said he had two options: “Cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now.”

Block announced the opening of a European hub for the business in Dublin in January this year.

Dorsey said that he would be holding a video call to talk through the details of the reduction in force.

He acknowledged that such a sweeping change carries risks, “but so does standing still”.

“We’ve done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we’ve pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles,” he said.

“I accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we’ve built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.”