Meta continues to reformat its business around artificial intelligence, with the social media giant informing employees that it’s reassigning 7,000 staff members to work on AI initiatives. At the same time, Meta is also cutting around 8,000 staff to increase its internal reliance on AI, and rationalize costs amid rising infrastructure expenses.
As reported by The New York Times, Meta informed employees on Monday of these changes, including the reassignments.
As per NYT: “Employees will be moved to four new organizations focused on building new AI tools and apps, Janelle Gale, Meta’s head of human resources, said in an internal memo. The organizations will use ‘AI native design structures’ and have fewer managers per employee than other parts of the company, she said, adding that company leaders will send details about the new roles on Wednesday.”
The updated workflow increases Meta’s AI development push, with the company investing hundreds of billions into AI development, as it seeks to lead the way on the rapidly evolving technology.
At the same time, Meta is also planning to cut 8,000 roles, with many of these positions to be taken over by AI tools and systems, instead of human workers.
The job cuts have been rumored for some time, and follow earlier role reductions in other parts of the organization, as Meta continues to realign its structure around AI development. In January, Meta cut 10% of staff from its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for its AR and VR initiatives, among others. That move was seen as another step away from its metaverse project, which had previously been the focus before AI gained momentum.
This latest round of job cuts and reassignments further refines and streamlines Meta’s organizational structure. Though as noted, it’s expected that many roles within the company will also be replaced by AI tools, as Meta looks to put its money where its mouth is in exploring the potential of its AI developments.
Indeed, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly been training an AI agent on his own day-to-day workflow and decision-making process, as a means to potentially build a CEO bot of sorts that would be able to replicate his output in automated form.
Zuckerberg has also talked about the potential of AI tools to take over from human workers in at least some technical roles.
In an interview with Joe Rogan in January 2025, Zuckerberg discussed the rapid development of AI systems, saying that: “Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.”
Meta’s latest job rationalizations reflect the real-world application of this statement, with the company looking to reduce labor costs, and increase reliance on AI, as it develops the next stage of the tech.
It’ll be interesting to see how that impacts the company’s process, and whether Meta can, in fact, automate significant amounts of its internal workflow with AI, and what these reassigned staff will actually be doing to support the shift.
Meta is expected to make a follow-up announcement on expanded layoffs later this week.
