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AJ Angie Jones Angie Jones On The New Stack Podcast

“All day long, we can say, you need to use AI. That is not convincing to people. But if you can show, hey, I can produce twice, three times, 10 times as much work as before, and not just any kind of work, but work that moves the needle, that actually solves customer problems and is of high quality, no one can argue against that.”

The New Stack Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“All day long, we can say, you need to use AI. That is not convincing to people. But if you can show, hey, I can produce twice, three times, 10 times as much work as before, and not just any kind of work, but work that moves the needle, that actually solves customer problems and is of high quality, no one can argue against that.” — Angie Jones, The New Stack Podcast

Context

Frederic Lardinois asked for tips for managers pushing AI adoption. Angie Jones, who led AI enablement at Block, says visible results ended the need to push people.

Transcript

The New Stack Podcast Around 10:48 into the episode
Angie Jones

It's change management.

Frederic Lardinois

Yeah, yeah. Do you have some tips for how to handle that? If I'm a manager, maybe. Yeah,

Angie Jones

yeah, I do actually. I think it's really important for the results. So I took an approach. I remember this model. It came to mind as I was trying to figure out our AI enablement strategy. And it's the 1990 model where in any given community, whether that be a social media platform or internet or anything like that, 1% are going to be the people that actually produce the content. There'll be 9% that'll tinker, you know, and then the vast majority of that 90% consume. Right. And when I thought about that in terms of AI enablement, I said, I have to find the 1%. And that's what I gathered. So out of 3,500, I had 50 of these engineers who needed to look across the entire organization, our 25,000 repos, and figure out how do we do AI here. Right. And that, like I said, built it into the system. But also what was most important is the results. So all day long, we can say, you need to use AI. That is not convincing to people, you know? But if you can show, hey, I can produce twice, three times, 10 times as much work as before, and not just any kind of work, but work that moves the needle, that actually solves customer…

Frederic Lardinois

Yeah. And then they use up all your tokens as in the process.

Angie Jones

Yes.

Frederic Lardinois

You do, you know, you're in the leadership of an open source foundation now. So let's talk about this in the context of open source as well, because different, you know, different fractions exist in that world when it comes to using AI for development and being a developer right now, right? How do…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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