After #1443117, I meant to check when the next earnings call was for Block to get some more info than just a tweet. Turned out that last night was the Q4/25 earnings call which touched upon this a lot - great orchestration there on Block's part - so there was no work for me to plan for the future, only action to be taken...

Below you will find some more elaboration from the transcript I've found most applicable after listening through the whole recording. I've edited out the verbal hesitations we all get to have during live Q&A to make it more readable, but have otherwise left the segments I selected intact ^[1]. We can do analysis in the comments.

Jack's additional introductionJack's additional introduction

We're making this change after delivering one of our strongest years. We set clear priorities for the year and we executed on all of them. In 2, gross profit growth more than doubled from the first quarter to the fourth quarter. We surpassed rule of 40 in the fourth quarter. We reignited Cash App network growth and engagement. We scaled our lending products and delivered strong returns. We accelerated square GPV growth and had our strongest new volume added year on record. We shipped our first proto units and we increased share repurchases to return more capital to shareholders. We have conviction in achieving the long-term financial targets we laid out at investor day and are meaningfully raising our initial outlook for 2.

We know how to grow this business and this decision today is a choice about how we operate it going forward. The core the core thesis is simple. Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company. We're already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better. An intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every single week. I don't think we're early to this realization. I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I'd rather get there honestly and our on our own terms than be forced into it reactively.

And this isn't just about efficiency. Block serves millions of customers, sellers and consumers who are going to feel the economic effects of this same ship. Small businesses that rely on us to get paid, to manage their money, to access capital. individuals navigating a financial landscape that's changing fast. Our job is to help them navigate it through it. That's not a new mission for us, but the urgency behind it is more pronounced, and the speed at which we need to deliver is accelerating. So, here's how we're going to operate from here.

First, intelligence will be at the core of how the entire company works. How we make decisions, how we build trust and manage risk, how we build products, and how we serve customers. We're moving toward a model where our customers can build their own features directly on top of our capabilities. That changes the nature of what we are as a company and it dramatically increases the value we can deliver for customer.

Second, extreme focus. There are four things we're going to focus on building now as a company. customer capabilities, interfaces where we can compose and deliver those capabilities, proactive intelligence based on our deep customer understanding and real-time data, and an intelligence model to fully orchestrate the company's operations. This allows us to best serve the master plan we laid out at investor day. And third, speed. A company of our new size has no excuse for being slow. We will decide faster, ship faster, and learn faster. The structure we're building is designed exactly for that. We believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster intelligence native company. Everything we do from here is in service of that.

To the question from JPMTo the question from JPM

Why are you ready to make this change now?

There's a there's a few things that have all been compounding towards this moment in this time. As you know we have been working very hard to functionalize the company. That's a big part of what gives us more confidence in making this move. We were operating a company with basically two companies with inside of it both having their own structure, a lot of duplication and as we functionalized it allowed us to act more like one company and recognize where there are common capabilities and common foundation. and we're still doing a lot of that work, but I have the confidence that we're in a place that we can move much faster there.

I also believe that we were the first agentic harness out in the market. This is Goose. But something happened in December of last year where the models just got an order of magnitude more capable and more intelligent. And it's really shown a path forward in terms of us being able to apply it to nearly every single thing that we do. So if there are any gaps in our usage of of AI right now, it's application gap and I'm really confident that we can go through the majority of our organization certainly our development but the majority of our organization and apply these tools in a much stronger way that has the effect of allowing us to ship much faster to explore a lot of the paths much broader so we can run the right experiments and get to the right answers and give feedback immediately for product market fit and ultimately to operate more and more of the company in a way that I think all companies will eventually go.

I do think the tools are at a state right now where every single company out there is going to run and grow in a fundamentally different way and be structured in a fundamentally different way. And a big part of me wanting to do this right now is I wanted to get ahead of it. And I'm confident that we've laid the foundation in order to do that and to push really fast to to get there. So we're in a place where like a lot of what we've been working with and all these threads are coming together in the right moment.

I want to make sure that we're ahead of the market, ahead of our customers expectations and actually building for the future. I do believe that a lot of the expectation going forward is not just that we deliver intelligence to our customers through managerbot and moneybot for instance, but the very end of that is that they can build their own features and build their own visualizations on top of our capabilities through our interfaces. We have incredible distribution. We have incredible understanding in real time of real transactional data on both sides of the counter and we can proactively prompt our customers and we can proactively compose interfaces that will fit the task before them which I think is quite unique and not something that you can find certainly at other companies in our space but but also more broadly in in technology.

And you know, I intend that that we that we win in this space and that we and that we grow and bring this intelligence to both sellers and to individuals and ideally to bring them together into this one ecosystem we're calling neighborhoods.

To the question from Cantor FitzgeraldTo the question from Cantor Fitzgerald

Do you see AI as a new competitive vector where Block has an opportunity to sort of leapfrog competitors or redefine the competitive landscape? What gives you guys the right to win here? What are Block's competitive advantages in AI?

Yeah, I do. I think it goes back to those four things that we we want to focus on right now in terms of what we build as a company. The first that sets us apart is all of our capabilities that we've built up over time. That's everything from our network and peer-to-peer. It's the fact that we can issue cards that we can accept cards that we can lend money to sellers and individuals. These are very very hard to acquire as capabilities and they're hard to maintain.

And these these are things that represent exact use cases that customers are coming to us in the first place for. When you pair that with the interface we have a massive install interface on the Square side with our merchants. We have the same on the Cash App side through an app and the website. What we'll be able to do is compose these capabilities fluidly to deliver them to all of our customers in real time in a much more personalized way in a way that they're going to feel like they can actually build their features and their functionality themselves. I think that's a significant advantage.

I think the biggest advantage though is our understanding of our customers. We have an understanding of both sides of the counter. We have real time data which is very real transactional data and we can connect it from the merchant to the consumer and we can actually use that understanding to be a lot more proactive. Instead of our customers coming to our intelligence systems and knowing what question to ask and what to prompt the AI, we can actually prompt our customers and we can do it in the right time so that they can have an experience where they have an intelligent system that is looking to protect their business and to protect their individual finances and help them along whatever goals they might have.

And these are out today and something that we're going to continue to build on. And then finally is making sure that we're using this intelligence and we're building these world models to help us orchestrate the company much better and be a whole lot more efficient about how we work and how we deliver and and how we ship.

I know all four of those together really set us apart and a big part of the the move we made today was to get us in position to do just that and to to be ahead of our customers expectations and to be ahead of the curve and and actually being able to deliver that new functionality.

1. No GPU ticks other than for my screen were burned in the creation of this post; 100% manual meatbag work. ↩