AI Agents Are Coming to Org Charts as Firms Justify $730B Spend

Companies will spend more than $730 billion on AI this year, and Block CFO Amrita Ahuja says that bill is about to reshape org charts: AI agents will soon sit on them alongside human employees.

Ahuja, who serves as Block's chief financial officer and chief operating officer, made the prediction at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Tuesday. She argued that the pressure to justify AI spending will show up in two ways: job displacement and a shift in how employees learn to work with AI. Workers, she said, will be responsible for both training and deploying these agents.

"Where things are headed—and I've already heard about a couple companies doing this, so we're on the frontier—is you look at your work chart that your company publishes, and it will have not only units, but agents," Ahuja told Fortune senior writer Sheryl Estrada. "Those agents, not too dissimilar to humans, need to be developed over time."

What does Block's own restructuring show?

Block has already run the experiment. In February, CEO Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of the company's entire staff, part of a structural overhaul tied to expanded use of AI to automate workflows. A 40% cut is not a trimming exercise; it is a wholesale redesign of how the company operates.

Ahuja's caveat is worth noting: agents, like people, are not plug-and-play. "They need more context. They need more information," she said. "They need to understand their goals, and those may change. And so, I do think we're headed into a new frontier as to what the organization looks like."

The takeaway: AI on the org chart means AI on the training budget too, and neither line item is small.

Why are CFOs stress-testing the spending?

Shelagh Glaser, chief financial officer of Synopsys, framed the problem in unusually domestic terms. She likened AI spending to snacks in the break room: some customers need premium tiers of products, others are served by internal models.

"The cost for AI was pretty reasonable until it wasn't," Glaser said at the summit. "We are investing in AI. It is an important investment. We want our team to have the latest greatest tools, but just along with everything else, is being super intentional about what that investment is, and that then forms the strategy of how we think about how we get the customer."

Her point is that AI investment must be purposeful to be defensible inside a company. Translation: the era of buying AI tools without a written business case is closing.

Where is the return supposed to come from?

Michelle Zatlyn, cofounder, president, and board co-chair of Cloudflare, offered one answer: AI agents have become "an extension of our team," but the bigger payoff may be internal talent discovery. Thousands of Cloudflare employees now have access to software that lets them become "builders" and surface new AI use cases.

"It's been amazing to see where the best builders come from," Zatlyn said. "It's not where you'd expect."

Amazon takes a more metric-driven route. Heather Zorn, Amazon's vice president of customer experience products and services, said the company measures returns by tracking adoption first, then engagement, then efficiency through outcomes like time saved. But she dismissed any ambiguity about the finish line.

"The ultimate KPI is revenue growth," Zorn said. "That is the ultimate KPI. We don't need another KPI."

The plain reading: efficiency metrics are interim evidence, and revenue is the verdict.

What is left unsaid?

Notably absent from the summit discussion: a concrete figure tying any of these programs to realized savings or revenue gains. Ahuja's frontier companies listing agents on org charts went unnamed, and no one quantified displacement. With spending forecast above $730 billion this year, the burden of proof now sits with executives who promised the math would work. The next round of earnings calls will show whether agents earn their spot on the chart.