AI spending is forcing tech companies to redraw their internal maps.
At the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif., Block CFO and COO Amrita Ahuja said she expects more companies to put AI agents directly into organizational charts. She said some companies are already doing it and described it as a 'new frontier' for how a company is organized.
'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.
Ahuja said those agents would need to be developed over time. 'They need more context. They need more information,' she said. 'They need to understand their goals, and those may change.'
The backdrop is a heavy wave of AI investment. The story said spending is expected to exceed '$730 billion this year,' and companies are making broad workforce changes to justify that outlay. Earlier this year, Block CEO Jack Dorsey laid off '40% of his entire staff' as the company expanded AI adoption to automate workflows.
Shelagh Glaser, chief financial officer of Synopsys, said AI has to be integrated and deployed 'purposeful[ly]' in order to be defensible to a company. She compared AI spending to snacks in the break room and said firms have to be 'super intentional' about what they are buying and why.
Michelle Zatlyn, cofounder, president and board of directors co-chair of Cloudflare, said AI can unlock talent that was already inside the company. She said AI agents have become 'an extension of our team,' while employees now have software that lets them become 'builders' and uncover new use cases.
Amazon vice president Heather Zorn said the company measures AI returns by adoption, then engagement, then efficiency, including time saved. But she said the most important measure is whether AI lifts the top line.
'The ultimate KPI is revenue growth,' Zorn said. 'That is the ultimate KPI. We don't need another KPI.'
The market has already voted on the direction of travel. Capital is flowing into AI, and companies are reorganizing their labor around it. The question for investors is not whether the tool is fashionable, but whether it earns its keep.
For the taxpayer and the broader market, the deeper issue is incentives. When firms chase AI spending to defend budgets, the real scoreboard is productivity, margins and revenue. If the technology delivers, free enterprise wins. If it does not, the cost will be buried in restructuring, layoffs and wasted capital.
