Block's CTO quantifies the impact of their internal AI agent, Goose. AI-forward engineering teams save 8-10 hours weekly, a figure he considers the absolute baseline. He notes, "this is the worst it will ever be," suggesting exponential gains are coming.

Don't just sprinkle AI features onto your existing product ('AI at the edge'). Transformative companies rethink workflows and shrink their old codebase, making the LLM a core part of the solution. This is about re-architecting the solution from the ground up, not just enhancing it.

As AI agents handle technical execution, the most valuable human skill becomes ideation. Replit CEO Amjad Massad predicts this will dissolve rigid corporate hierarchies in favor of adaptable teams of generalists who collaborate with autonomous AI tools to bring ideas to life.

Block's CTO observes a U-shaped curve in AI adoption among engineers. The most junior engineers embrace it naturally, like digital natives. The most senior engineers are also highly eager, as they recognize the potential to automate tedious tasks they've performed countless times, freeing them up for high-level architectural work.

AI tools reduce the communication overhead and lengthy handoffs that traditionally separated product and engineering. By streamlining the path from idea to code, AI makes the combined Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) role more viable, enabling a single leader to manage both functions effectively.

Instead of static org charts, AI can monitor team performance and sentiment to propose small, ongoing adjustments—like rotating a member for fresh eyes or changing meeting formats. This turns organizational design into a dynamic, data-driven process of continuous improvement, overcoming human inertia.

Contrary to the classic engineering rule to "never rewrite," Block's CTO believes AI will make this the new standard. He is pushing his teams to imagine a world where for every release, they delete the entire app (`rm -rf`) and rebuild it from scratch, with AI respecting all incremental improvements from the previous version.

The key to driving AI adoption at Block was leadership by example. CEO Jack Dorsey and CTO Danji Prasana use their internal AI tool, Goose, daily. They argue this hands-on approach provides more insight into organizational workflow changes than any top-down mandate or analysis of industry reports.

At Block, the most surprising impact of AI hasn't been on engineers, but on non-technical staff. Teams like enterprise risk management now use AI agents to build their own software tools, compressing weeks of work into hours and bypassing the need to wait for internal engineering teams.