Tech companies are overhauling company structures to justify AI spending, and it means AI agents could start appearing on org charts, Block CFO says

Block’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer, Amrita Ahuja, thinks the next phase of corporate AI won’t just be about tools. It’ll be about paperwork, power, and the org chart itself. Speaking Tuesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, she said companies are heading toward a setup where AI agents appear alongside human teams and employees are expected to train and deploy them.

That idea is easier to sell when the bill is enormous. Investment in AI is expected to top $730 billion this year, and companies are already making hard choices to support it. Earlier this year, Block’s CEO Jack Dorsey cut 40% of the company’s staff as part of a broader overhaul tied to its push to automate workflows with AI.

Ahuja said the frontier is a company chart that includes not just units, but agents. Those agents, she said, would need to be developed over time, given more context, fed more information, and adjusted as goals change. The point, she suggested, is that AI can’t just be dropped into a company and treated like finished software. It has to be managed like something that grows.

That same pressure showed up in comments from other executives on stage. Shelagh Glaser, chief financial officer of Synopsys, said AI spending has to be purposeful to be defensible inside a company. She compared it to snacks in the break room: some customers need premium products, while others need internal models. The message was plain enough. AI is no longer cheap by default, so companies are being pushed to explain exactly why they’re buying it.

Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare framed the payoff differently. She said AI agents can act as an extension of a team, while giving thousands of employees software that helps them become builders and spot new use cases. At Amazon, Heather Zorn said the company tracks AI value by first measuring adoption, then engagement, then efficiency through outcomes like time saved. But for her, the final test is money: revenue growth. That’s the number that counts when everyone’s trying to prove the spend was worth it.