Earlier this year, Block CEO Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of his entire staff, part of a structural overhaul within the company as it ballooned its adoption of AI to automate workflows.
As more companies pour investments into the burgeoning technology, expected to exceed $730 billion this year, they are having to make sweeping changes across their workforce. Amrita Ahuja, Block’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer, predicts many of these changes needed to justify all this spending will take the form of both displacement and in how employees learn to engage with AI. At the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Tuesday, Ahuja said she expects more companies to integrate AI agents into their organizational charts, and workers will be responsible for both training and deploying these agents.
“Where things are headed—and I’ve already heard about a couple 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 told Fortune senior writer Sheryl Estrada. “Those agents, not too dissimilar to humans, need to be developed over time.”
“They need more context. They need more information,” she continued. “They need to understand their goals, and those may change. And so, I do think we’re headed into a new frontier as to what the organization looks like.”
At the foundation of workforce changes related to AI is the idea integrating and deploying this technology has to be purposeful in order to be defensible to a company, explained Shelagh Glaser, chief financial officer of Synopsys. She likened AI spending to snacks in the break room, where some customers are in need of premium tiers of products, and others, internal models.
“The cost for AI was pretty reasonable until it wasn’t,” Glaser said at the summit. “We are investing in AI. It is an important investment. We want our team to have the latest greatest tools, but just along with everything else, is being super intentional about what that investment is, and that then forms the strategy of how we think about how we get the customer.”
Michelle Zatlyn, cofounder, president, and board of directors co-chair of Cloudflare, said one way AI can offer a return on investment is by unlocking previously unknown talent within a company. On one hand, AI agents have become “an extension of our team,” Zatlyn explained, but thousands of employees now have access to software that allows them to become “builders” and uncover new AI use cases.
“It’s been amazing to see where the best builders come from,” she said. “It’s not where you’d expect.”
Amazon 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, noted Heather Zorn, Amazon’s vice president of customer experience products and services. But above all, the most powerful metric in how useful AI is in the workplace is how much money it brings in, Zorn said.
“The ultimate KPI is revenue growth,” she said. “That is the ultimate KPI. We don’t need another KPI.”
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