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Block’s (XYZ) CFO Amrita Ah explained the mechanics behind the decision to lay off 40% of its staff to pursue AI-driven work functions in a call last night.

Some excerpts below.

What’s the read on the business since announcing the decision?

Ah: I mean, look, we’ve been on this journey for a little while. This is not just a fly-by-night decision for us or something that we took frivolously. We’ve been using tools, developing, actually, our own agents called codename Goose that we’ve been using now for 18 months, and so we see directly the power of automating our workflows and building faster using these tools, and that’s what gave us the confidence to do this. We can envision that other companies get on that journey as well. We also know that there is, you know, constraints on creativity, and that we are asking our teams to do more, but we’re also empowering them with all the most powerful tools in the world, so they can build the ways in which they will be getting more done with automation. And so that’s how we’ve chosen to go about it. We decided to take this more bold, upfront, decisive action so that we could rebuild and move forward from here, versus continuously being reactive and, you know, death by a 1,000 cuts through the intervals over the next couple of years. We wanted to make a bold move here so that we could frankly be more front-footed in our stance.

What did you see in the business that warranted doing this now?

I think it started with a few areas, a few disciplines, and it has now spread to really across every discipline within the business. The two that I would highlight are engineering and customer service. With our engineers, we are seeing a 40% increase in productivity and efficiency towards production code being shipped per engineer since September. I mean, this is the pace at which things are accelerating. We’d obviously seen increases before that, as people started to get their hands on tools, but even since September, we’ve seen a 40% improvement with customer service. 75% of Cash App’s customer service, questions, and answers are handled through automation, and oftentimes these agents actually get a customer to their answer faster. And so with strong NPS and CSAT scores, we’re actually able to automate a lot of this work, which then means we, the humans that are working at Block, can do more of the strategic work, more of the thinking, more of the things that involve taste and judgment, which is really a lot of the exciting work. So that’s some of what we saw over the past, you know, year plus. We’re now seeing designers able to push code into production. We now see accountants being able to use these tools to speed up our workflows and get to insights faster. And again, that’s part of what led to the decision.

What’s your advice to other CFOs wrestling with a decision like this?

Ah: I think it’s better to do it a little bit early than to do it too late. And I would encourage everybody, including my fellow CFOs, to just be curious and using the tools you often don’t get the aha moment until you realize you’ve automated a piece of your work, something that might have taken days before, can now take hours or less. You know, it is pretty powerful to see in action, and so I would say there’s nothing like just getting deep in it yourself. We as leaders now are not managing people; we are managing outcomes. And so in order to understand that, you need to actually get deep into the work. And as a CFO, you no longer are being prized on your finance acumen. You’re being praised on how you’re on your system thinking like how the work actually happens, and how it happens in a durable way, with integrity. And I think that is increasingly going to involve evolutions in the technology that we’re using to do our work.