When the fintech Block recently announced it was cutting nearly half its workforce, many questioned whether it was another tech company cleaning up a pandemic-era hiring binge. But CFO and COO Amrita Ahuja offered a data point to consider.
Block generated roughly $500,000 in gross profit per employee in 2019—a figure that barely budged even as headcount ballooned from a few thousand to around 13,000 during the hyper-growth years, Ahuja noted in a recent interview with Fortune. Then something changed.
As AI tools embedded more deeply into the company’s workflows, that metric began climbing: $750,000 per employee in 2024, $1 million in 2025. And if Block hits the targets the targets in its 2026 outlook—now expecting gross profit to grow 18% year over year and profits to climb 54%—gross profit per employee will reach approximately $2 million in 2026, double last year’s level.
“I don’t think this is about bloat,” Ahuja said. “This is about empowering our teams with the most world-class and powerful tools.”
Central to that shift is Block’s internally built AI agent, code-named Goose, which has been running in production for 18 months. Since September, developer productivity has jumped 40% per engineer. One risk underwriting model that previously took a full quarter to build was completed in a fraction of the time. The productivity math is what gave leadership confidence to cut 4,000 jobs from a position of strength, Ahuja said. The decision was part of a longer transformation. “This is a two-year journey for us,” she said. “This was not an overnight decision.”
