Opinion: Before you adopt the tool, ask who built it

Matthew Stublefield

A few weeks ago, Jack Dorsey – co-founder of Twitter and now CEO of Block, the parent of Square and Cash App – published an essay announcing that his company is dismantling its middle management layer entirely. Not flattening it. Replacing it with artificial intelligence. He calls the new structure “a company built as an intelligence.”

Two thousand years after the Roman army invented hierarchical coordination, Dorsey is betting we no longer need humans to handle that coordination. Whether he’s right isn’t the point – the speed of the bet is. An announcement like this would have been unthinkable 18 months ago.

Acceleration is real
I see it in my own work. Over the past year, I’ve built an AI-assisted workflow for my consulting practice that lets me operate at roughly eight times the pace I was going in 2024. Not 8% better. Eight times. Drafts that took me a day take a few minutes. Research that took weeks takes an afternoon.

I’m not telling you this to sell a tool. I’m telling you because if a one-person consultancy in Springfield can move that fast, every business in this region is about to feel the same gravitational pull. Some of you already do. Some of you have a vendor in your inbox right now promising to do for your company what Block is doing to itself.

Productivity isn’t a neutral gain
Here’s what every Springfield business leader should sit with: AI tools are not magic. They’re products – trained on specific data, built by specific people, shipped with specific incentives. They make decisions in ways that look objective but aren’t.

The strategist Alicia McKay has a term for the skill this moment demands: power literacy. She argues that critical thinking alone isn’t enough anymore. Power literacy is the reflex to ask who benefits every time you encounter a tech announcement, a product pitch or an AI-generated answer.

This isn’t conspiracy thinking. It’s the same due diligence you already apply to a vendor contract or a new hire. You’d never sign a contract without asking whose interests it serves. You shouldn’t adopt an AI tool without asking the same question.

Power literacy in practice
Three moves to try next time you have the opportunity:

• When a vendor pitches you an AI tool, ask who profits if you adopt it and what they’re incentivized to leave out. A demo shows you the tool working. It doesn’t show you the tradeoffs.

• When an AI gives you an answer, ask what it was trained on and whose worldview got baked in. Every AI you use has opinions, inherited from its training data and the humans who built it. Treat the output like a draft from a smart intern – useful, fast and still in need of your judgment.

• When a company announces a sweeping AI change like Block’s, ask who benefits and who carries the cost. Sometimes the answer is customers. Sometimes it’s shareholders. Sometimes it’s neither. Knowing who changes what signals you take from the news.

Opportunity, responsibility
AI gives us a tremendous opportunity. It is the biggest productivity lever I’ve seen in my career, and businesses that use it thoughtfully will have an edge. But so is the responsibility. The leaders who thrive this decade will adopt the tools and keep asking the power questions.

The next AI announcement you see, whether it’s in the news or in your inbox, try the filter. Who benefits? You already have the skill. You just have to use it.

Matthew Stublefield is the founder and principal consultant at Fieldway LLC and is a member of the Springfield Tech Council advocacy committee. He can be reached at matthew@fieldway.org.