“We thought about fundamentally refactoring how we operate as a company,” Amrita Ahuja, Block’s CFO and COO, said during a panel I moderated at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit on Tuesday in Santa Barbara, where she was joined by leaders from Synopsys, Cloudflare, and Amazon.

Over the past few years, the fintech company has been consolidating and simplifying its processes and using AI in the business since early 2024. Earlier this year, Block, the parent company of Square and Cash App, cut its workforce by 40% and removed layers of management.

“We fundamentally believe that in a world of AI, you absolutely need the human at the center,” Ahuja said. You still need people in every function who are builders, goal-setters, and strategy deciders, she said. But you no longer need a person whose job is to pass information along or check work before it reaches the actual reviewer, she added.

At Block, engineers improved their code review changes by 150% between the start of the year and midyear, and “even non-engineers have a 60% improvement,” Ahuja said, adding that 15% of code changes are now almost fully automated—meaning “there’s only a human in the loop at the end for the final decision,” she said.

Measuring the return is still evolving, though. Much of the industry is still weighing AI costs against personnel savings, she said. Block is working to refine a metric it calls “timed customer value,” which would trace a code change to a feature, then to a customer interaction, and finally to value.

For Synopsys, a company that develops software for designing and verifying semiconductors, CFO Shelagh Glaser said the cost side got real fast. AI spending “was pretty reasonable until it wasn’t,” she said, comparing employees’ usage habits to snacks in the break room. Synopsys had to decide who gets premium tiers and who uses internal models. It also built its own metering system when some providers didn’t offer one. The goal is to be “super intentional about where that investment is,” with returns measured in customer outcomes, not just product releases.

Cloudflare co-founder and President Michelle Zatlyn, whose company provides web infrastructure and cybersecurity services, said the company now hires “both employees and agents” and wants all of its roughly 5,000 people to be builders across the business. One standout was a finance director who made extensive use of agents and whom the CFO tapped to lead AI transformation for the finance team, Zatlyn said. Cloudflare also committed to hiring more than 1,000 interns in 2026, and they’ve helped teams become more AI-native, she said.

“The important thing as a leader right now is to make sure that you’re giving time and space and permission for your teams to learn,” Heather Zorn, Amazon’s VP of customer experience, products, and services said. The company is able to measure returns on investment in how employees use AI through measuring adoption first, then engagement, and then efficiency through outcomes like time saved, Zorn said.

“You want to create something that wins for the customer, and then you have to find a way that it wins for the business as well,” she said. Leaders also have to figure out how long they’re willing to invest before seeing both wins, she added.

Ahuja said she expects more companies to integrate AI agents into their organizational charts, with workers responsible for both training and deploying these agents.

“Where things are headed—and I’ve already heard about a couple of 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 humans, but agents,” she said. “Those agents, not too dissimilar to humans, need to be developed over time.”

Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Andrew Hodson was named CFO of PharmaCorp, effective Oct. 27. Hodson takes over from Terri Tatchell, who retires that day. She will stay on as a consultant for three months to help with the handover. Hodson was most recently head of finance at Marshall Land Systems. Before that, he was VP of finance at Vendasta Technologies, where he led the finance work on strategic acquisitions. He also spent six years at Deloitte Canada.

Nathan Iles was appointed SVP of finance at Dauch Corporation, a supplier of driveline and metal-forming parts to the auto industry, effective Nov. 2. He will become CFO on Dec. 1, succeeding Christopher May. That same day, May will become EVP and chief administrative officer, keeping the IT organization and taking on executive oversight of HR. Iles brings more than 25 years of finance leadership, most recently as CFO of Standard Motor Products, an auto parts supplier. Before that, he was VP and CFO of UCI International Holdings.

Big Deal

Many finance teams are adopting AI faster than they can trust what it produces, according to OneStream's first Forward Finance Index, a survey of 1,300 CFOs and other senior finance leaders at mid-market and enterprise companies in the U.S., U.K. and France.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) say AI is already cutting manual work in the close, reporting and reconciliation. Yet just 14% say their AI investments have delivered "enterprise value and decision impact." Data is a major obstacle: while 71% are confident their teams provide trusted data for decisions, only 40% describe their financial reporting data as fully transparent, meaning it can be traced, explained and validated.

Four in 10 respondents say data quality problems regularly block or delay AI projects. Workforce readiness is another gap: just 15% have a fully embedded AI skills program, even though two-thirds believe failing to prepare their workforce will make their organization irrelevant within five years.

Overall, only 6% of finance organizations qualify as leaders across all five areas measured by the index: AI strategy, data, workforce, operations and IT collaboration. More than half (52%) rank as "Followers." OneStream, which sells finance software, argues that leaders treat AI as a change in operating model rather than a series of pilots, grounded in trusted data and a workforce ready for AI. 

Going deeper

Overheard

 "As business leaders, we’re wired to chase speed, scale and efficiency. However, in our pursuit of bigger, better and faster, we shouldn’t lose sight of a key element of lasting success: trust."

—Kate Barton, CEO of Dentons law firm, writes in a Fortune opinion piece.