His reason? "Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company."

Then he said something that should make every professional pay attention: "Most companies are late. I think the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion within the next year."

Block's stock jumped 24% on the news. Wall Street loved it. Other CEOs are watching.

Meanwhile, I just built a 15-slide investor deck in under 3 minutes. Not a rough draft. A complete, polished presentation with narrative structure, visual direction, and slide-ready content.

PowerPoint isn't dead because presentations are going away. It's dead because the hours you used to spend staring at blank slides are now optional.

This week: what the Block layoffs mean for you, and a 6-prompt system that turns Claude into your entire presentation team.

Let's get into it 👇

The Old Way:

You need to build a presentation. You open PowerPoint and stare at a blank slide. You write too much text, then delete half of it. You redesign the layout three times. You realize slide 7 should come before slide 4 and spend 20 minutes reorganizing. A 10-slide deck takes a full day. Or you pay a designer $100 and wait a week.

Most people treat presentations as a creative task that requires starting from scratch every time. It doesn't.

The Replacement:

Six prompts that turn Claude into your presentation team — strategist, writer, designer, and editor working together. You run them in sequence, each one building on the last, and walk away with a complete, polished deck in under 3 minutes of AI processing time.

This isn't about making AI do a mediocre job faster. It's about following a professional presentation process that most people skip because it takes too long manually. Blueprint first, then structure, then narrative, then visuals, then content, then polish. The prompts enforce the process.

Total AI processing time: ~150 seconds

Your time: 10-15 minutes to fill in variables and paste between prompts

🔒 The complete system is for pro members. Free readers see the overview above. Upgrade to get the step-by-step instructions, copy-paste templates, and beginner-friendly setup guide.

🎯 Granola — AI notepad that sits in your meetings, captures the transcript, and generates structured notes automatically. Pairs perfectly with this week's automation. Best for: Discovery calls, client meetings.

📊 Rows AI — Spreadsheet tool with natural language queries built in. Ask it questions about your data and get instant charts and analysis. No formulas needed. Best for: Tracking proposal win rates, client metrics.

🧠 Cursor — AI-first code editor that hit #3 in developer tool rankings this month. Multiple AI agents work on different parts of your codebase simultaneously. Best for: Building custom tools and automations.

📥 Cowork by Anthropic — Claude for non-coders. Point it at a folder on your computer and it reads, edits, and creates files. Expense reports from receipts, organize messy downloads, draft documents from scattered notes. Just launched on Windows with full feature parity.

✍️ Claude Sonnet 4.6 — Dropped February 17 and beat GPT-5.2 in 70% of blind writing tests. The best value in AI writing right now — Opus-level output at Sonnet prices. Best for: Everything in this week's automation.

🔥 Block cuts 40% of workforce, blames AI directly. Jack Dorsey's payments company cut 4,000 jobs, citing AI as the explicit reason. "Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company." Stock jumped 24%. First major company to directly tie mass layoffs to AI efficiency. Read more →

📉 Citrini's "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" essay tanks markets. The viral Substack post imagined a scenario where AI causes 10.2% unemployment and a 38% S&P crash. Markets dropped 800 points on Monday. Citadel Securities published a point-by-point rebuttal showing software engineer demand is actually up 11% YoY. Read more →

🤖 Anthropic expands Cowork with enterprise plugins. The desktop AI agent now connects to Google Drive, Gmail, DocuSign, and FactSet. Companies can build custom plugins for legal, finance, and HR workflows. Software stocks that were down all week rallied after partners were named. Read more →

📹 London hosts largest anti-AI protest in history. 500 people marched through King's Cross in the "March Against the Machines," stopping at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta offices. Organizers from Pause AI and Pull the Plug demanded a global pause on frontier AI development. One protester's sign: "WHO WILL BE WHOSE TOOL?" Three years ago, their first protest drew five people. Read more →

What happened:

This was the week AI anxiety jumped from Twitter threads to the stock market to the unemployment office.

It started with essays. Matt Shumer's "Something Big Is Happening" hit 85 million views. Then Citrini Research published "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" — a fictional memo from June 2028 describing 10.2% unemployment, a 38% market crash, and a "human intelligence displacement spiral." Markets dropped. The Dow fell 800 points on Monday.

Then Thursday, Jack Dorsey made it real. Block cut 4,000 jobs, nearly half the company, and explicitly blamed AI. Not "restructuring." Not "efficiency." AI, specifically.

His exact words: "Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better."

He predicted most companies would "reach the same conclusion within the next year."

The contrarian view:

Citadel Securities' Frank Flight published a detailed rebuttal of the Citrini scenario. His key points:

The data doesn't match the fear. Software engineer job postings are actually up 11% year-over-year according to Indeed. The St. Louis Fed's analysis shows daily AI use for work is "unexpectedly stable" with "little evidence of imminent displacement risk."

Physical constraints brake adoption. Energy costs, chip shortages, and data center capacity create natural limits. "If the marginal cost of compute rises above the marginal cost of human labor, substitution will not occur."

History doesn't support doom loops. "Was Microsoft Office a complement or substitute for office workers?" Technology tends to augment, not wholesale replace.

Some economists suspect Block is "AI-washing": blaming layoffs on AI when the real issue is pandemic over-hiring. Block grew from 3,800 employees in 2019 to over 10,000 by 2026. That was going to correct regardless.

@mattshumer_ (Matt Shumer, CEO of OtherSideAI): "Block is laying off ~half of their staff due to advances in AI. This is one of the first major examples of AI driving layoffs, but certainly not the last. If you're saying 'this won't happen to me,' reevaluate your thoughts. Now. It may be the most important thing you do." The viral essay writer reacts to Block making his predictions real.

@clareshih (Clara Shih, Investor & Meta Advisor): "Square is just the beginning. Every CEO faces the same decision today that manufacturing CEOs did in 2000: do a big layoff or your competitor will. In 2000, jobs were lost to Shenzhen. In 2026, jobs will be lost to AI." The clearest explanation of the incentive structure.

@RhettReese (Rhett Reese, Deadpool screenwriter): "I hate to say it. It's likely over for us. In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases." Hollywood's reaction to Seedance 2.0.

@FrankFlight_CS (Frank Flight, Citadel Securities): "Despite the macroeconomic community struggling to forecast two-month-forward payroll growth with any reliable accuracy, the forward path of labor destruction can apparently be inferred with significant certainty from a hypothetical scenario posted on Substack." The contrarian view, with receipts.

Presentation Builder Starter Kit

Prompt Library Updates:

Resources Section:

Block cut 4,000 jobs and blamed AI directly. The stock went up. Other CEOs are taking notes.

You can read that news and feel anxious. Or you can read it and start using the same tools to make yourself more valuable.

The person who builds presentations in 3 minutes instead of 3 hours is the person who ships more, impresses more, and produces more. That's the person companies keep.

This week's automation isn't just about saving time on slides. It's about proving you're the one who knows how to use these tools, not the one being replaced by them.

Build a presentation this week. Use the system. See how fast it goes.

Then ask yourself: what else could I automate?

See you next Monday.

P.S. Next week: what happens when AI can do everyone's presentations in 3 minutes? You need something it can't replicate. We're building your personal brand system.