Meta’s AI Restructuring Could Cut Teams by 60%
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was engaged in a project aimed at rethinking the concept of work at Meta. However, Zuckerberg and his associates involved in the project had to abandon the initiative prior to its complete execution. Referred to as Project OT, which stands for “Organisation Transformation”, Zuckerberg’s plan envisioned artificial intelligence agents assuming a significant portion of the daily tasks performed by thousands of human employees, with smaller teams of employees supervising the AI agents. The initiative was integral to Meta’s strategy to transform into a “AI-native” organization, as reported. The project reportedly envisioned new AI agents at Meta being overseen by smaller, “talent-dense” groups of human staffers. Project OT could have reduced the size of certain Meta teams by as much as 60 per cent and redirected a greater volume of work to AI agents.
Under the plan, certain Meta employees would have transitioned into new roles, whereas others would have faced layoffs. The scale of the potential layoffs could have been as large as, or larger than, a previous round of cuts in which Meta laid off around 25 percent of its workforce, the report added. Meta had outlined its restructuring strategy in two phases, the first occurring in May and the second in November. According to the plan, layoffs would have coincided with the closure of open positions and the dismissal of employees deemed poor performers, as reported by Reuters. Meta reduced its workforce by 10 percent on May 20; however, Zuckerberg later reversed the decision regarding the planned layoffs in November, as reported. However, by that time, Meta employees were in a state of open dissent, as they perceived that Project OT was partially intended to supplant their roles.
Simultaneously, the AI agents central to the initiative were failing to produce the productivity improvements that Meta anticipated, leading some investors to scrutinise the returns on the company’s substantial investment in AI. Meta has confirmed that Project OT is currently in development, emphasising cost-cutting measures, team restructuring, and reallocating staff to new priority areas, including the production of training data for its AI models. “As part of our company restructuring earlier this year, we asked some teams to conduct a scenario planning exercise looking at the potential impact of redeployments, open role closures and cuts,” Meta said in a statement.
Meta also confirmed that it had planned to carry out layoffs in two waves and that the plan could have resulted in reducing the size of some of Meta’s teams by up to 60 percent. “This ultimately resulted in moving thousands of employees to do priority work on several newly-established teams, as has been publicly reported. Ultimately, we didn’t move forward with every scenario from the exercise – and it was never assumed we would.” However, the reasons behind Zuckerberg’s change of mind remain unclear, and Meta has opted not to provide him for comment.
