Block, Amazon, Synopsys and Cloudflare are rethinking how work gets done with AI

Good morning.

Block’s leaders didn’t want to sprinkle AI on top of existing work.

“We thought about fundamentally refactoring how we operate as a company,” Amrita Ahuja, Block’s CFO and COO, said during a panel I moderated at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit on Tuesday in Santa Barbara, where she was joined by leaders from Synopsys , Cloudflare, and Amazon .

Over the past few years, the fintech company has been consolidating and simplifying its processes and using AI in the business since early 2024.

Earlier this year, Block, the parent company of Square and Cash App, cut its workforce by 40% and removed layers of management.

“We fundamentally believe that in a world of AI, you absolutely need the human at the center,” Ahuja said.

You still need people in every function who are builders, goal-setters, and strategy deciders, she said.

But you no longer need a person whose job is to pass information along or check work before it reaches the actual reviewer, she added.

At Block, engineers improved their code review changes by 150% between the start of the year and midyear, and “even non-engineers have a 60% improvement,” Ahuja said, adding that 15% of code changes are now almost fully automated—meaning “there’s only a human in the loop at the end for the final decision,” she said.

Measuring the return is still evolving, though.

Much of the industry is still weighing AI costs against personnel savings, she said.

Block is working to refine a metric it calls “timed customer value,” which would trace a code change to a feature, then to a customer interaction, and finally to value.

For Synopsys, a company that develops software for designing and verifying semiconductors, CFO Shelagh Glaser said the cost side got real fast.

AI spending “was pretty reasonable until it wasn’t,” she said, comparing employees’ usage habits to snacks in the break room.