Dhanji R. Prasanna
Dhanji R. Prasanna is the chief technology officer at Block (formerly Square), where he’s managed more than 4,000 engineers over the past two years. Under his leadership, Block has become one of the most AI-native large companies in the world. Before becoming CTO, Dhanji wrote an “AI manifesto” to CEO Jack Dorsey that sparked a company-wide transformation (and his promotion to CTO).
Building & Shipping Skills
The most significant impact of AI automation often comes from empowering non-technical staff to build their own task-specific solutions without engineering roadmaps.
"What's been surprising and really amazing, the non-technical people using AI agents and programming tools to build things, the people that are able to embrace it to optimize for their particular workd..."
Measuring AI productivity requires viewing current time-savings as a foundational baseline that will only increase as the technology matures.
"We find engineering teams that are very, very AI forward are reporting about eight to 10 hours save per week. Whenever I hear a stat like this, I think an important element is this is the worst it wil..."
Team & Organization Skills
Transitioning from a siloed GM model to a centralized functional structure enables a company to align on singular technical strategies and drive excellence across the entire platform.
"So all engineers report into one single team now, all designers report into one single team and there's single head of engineering, single head of design, et cetera. And so that was the big transforma..."