Block’s AI Transformation

The year 2023 dawned with an unsettling hum in the tech world.

ChatGPT had just burst onto the scene, a digital Big Bang that sent ripples through Silicon Valley, leaving many to wonder if their existing empires were built on shifting sands.

For Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter and the architect behind the fintech powerhouse Block, the message was clear: adapt or face obsolescence.

He convened roughly 40 of his top executives weekly, a forum dedicated to charting a new course for a company best known for its ubiquitous Square credit card readers and the omnipresent Cash App.

Among those executives was Dhanji Prasanna, then a senior engineer who had spearheaded the engineering efforts for Cash App.

While Dorsey possessed an intuitive grasp of the seismic shift underway, a “hunch” as Prasanna describes it, the broader organization was still largely grappling with the implications of this nascent AI revolution.

It was October when Prasanna, sensing the urgency and the opportunity, penned a memo to Dorsey.

Its contents, undisclosed but clearly persuasive, laid out a compelling case for Block to not just acknowledge AI, but to aggressively invest in it.

Dorsey was convinced.

A month later, he flew to Sydney, Prasanna’s home, and offered him the role of Block’s Chief Technology Officer.

This was no ordinary promotion; it was a mandate for transformation.

Block, founded in 2009, was a creature of the Web 2.0 era, thriving alongside giants like Instagram and Airbnb.

But the AI frenzy threatened to render yesterday’s innovations quaint.

Prasanna, at 44, now bears the weight of ensuring Block doesn’t just survive, but thrives in this new epoch.

His efforts have already earned him a coveted spot on the 2025 Forbes CIO Next list, a testament to his vision and execution.

“AI is an existential moment that’s comparable to any of the major technological shifts that we’ve had,” Prasanna remarked, his directive unambiguous: “Our number one priority is to automate all of Block.”

The cornerstone of this ambitious automation drive is a piece of software named Goose.

Evoking the spirit of Maverick’s wingman, Goose is an open-source AI agent designed to empower teams to build their own specialized AI tools for diverse tasks.

Greenlit by Prasanna early last year, this project, managed by a lean team of up to eight engineers, is already punching above its weight.

Internally, non-technical teams have embraced it with remarkable enthusiasm.

Block’s Enterprise Risk Management team, for instance, leveraged Goose to create an agent that automates data gathering, compressing what was once a multi-week, analyst-intensive process into a streamlined operation.

Finance and treasury teams have similarly deployed Goose to construct sophisticated dashboards for tracking investments, including Bitcoin’s performance across various markets.

But the impact of Goose extends far beyond Block’s internal operations.

True to Block’s historical commitment to open source — a philosophy that saw it contribute to foundational technologies like MySQL and Envoy — Goose has been released into the wild.

Payment infrastructure behemoth Stripe, AI data and storage company Databricks, and frontier AI lab Anthropic are all reported users.

“Goose showed what’s possible when you design an agent with open protocols at the core,” observed David Soria Parra, an engineer at Anthropic.

While Block derives no direct revenue from Goose, its open availability strategically positions the company as a leader in frontier technology, fostering goodwill and accelerating AI adoption across the industry.

Moreover, Goose isn’t just a philanthropic endeavor; it directly powers Block’s own products, such as Moneybot, a new agent within Cash App that allows users to query their accounts, transactions, and spending habits.

Prasanna’s journey to this pivotal role is a narrative of resilience and learning.

The son of a teaching doctor and an architect, he grew up in Bangalore with dreams of creating video games.

After graduating from Marquette University in 2003, his early career at Google, beginning in 2008, saw him involved in ambitious but ultimately ill-fated projects like Google Wave and Google Plus.

“It was a solution in search of a problem,” he candidly recalls of Wave, labeling Google Plus “another epic disaster.”

These experiences, however, appear to have honed his understanding of innovation’s inherent risks and the importance of solving real-world problems.

His current successes extend beyond Goose.

Prasanna and his team have also been instrumental in advancing the open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP), co-created by Anthropic.

This standard provides a crucial interface for large language models like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to connect with external data and tools, effectively giving these “brains in a jar, arms and legs to go out and act in the real world,” as Prasanna describes it.

The protocol’s adoption by industry giants like Google and OpenAI underscores its significance.

The timing of Goose’s popularity is no coincidence, aligning with a broader enterprise craze for AI agents.

McKinsey’s November report indicated that over 60% of companies are experimenting with agents, though widespread scaling remains elusive.

Block, under Prasanna’s leadership, appears to be an outlier.

Roughly two-thirds of its more than 10,000 employees now use Goose weekly, reportedly saving them an average of eight to ten hours each.

This isn’t merely about efficiency; it’s about reclaiming Block’s identity.

“I’ve always thought of Block as a technology company,” Prasanna reflects, recalling a time when Block was mentioned in the same breath as Google, Uber, and Facebook.

That perception shifted as the company became primarily known as a fintech and financial services provider, leading to what Prasanna terms “identity drift.”

Despite a healthy $38 billion market capitalization and an 18% year-over-year gross profit growth to $2.6 billion in the third quarter, Block’s stock is down 21% year-to-date and has shed three-fourths of its value since its 2021 peak.

For Prasanna, the path forward is clear: Block must become an “AI-native company.”

“My main goal has been to refocus Block as a leader in frontier technology,” he reiterates.

With Goose as its powerful new engine, Block is not just adapting; it’s positioning itself at the vanguard of the AI revolution.

It has laid the groundwork for innovation, now it awaits the “golden eggs” — the transformative products and renewed market leadership that this bold pivot promises.