Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has told employees that the company’s restructuring has not delivered the faster progress in artificial intelligence (AI) agents that executives had expected, months after thousands of workers were laid off and reassigned to AI-focused teams.
Speaking during an internal town hall on Thursday, Zuckerberg admitted that development had slowed despite the company’s major investment in AI infrastructure.
Looking back at the past four months, he said the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” adding that the company’s bets on its new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.”
Meta began a major overhaul earlier this year as it sought to shift more resources towards AI.
In May, the company cut about 10 per cent of its global workforce, affecting roughly 8,000 employees, while around 7,000 others were moved into AI-focused teams, including one known as Agent Transformation.
Zuckerberg also acknowledged that the restructuring itself could have been handled better.
He said the process was not as “clean” as it could have been because executives had misjudged the timing of the changes.
Explaining why the company moved ahead with the overhaul, Zuckerberg said discussions with senior leaders early in the year showed there was concern that Meta was not moving quickly enough.
“Conversations he was having ‘with our top people’ when they started planning the restructuring in January and February ‘were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,’” he told employees.
He added that executives had been “super optimistic” about tools such as Claude Code, developed by AI startup Anthropic, and expected faster progress than the company has seen so far.
Even so, Zuckerberg said he believes Meta will begin to see stronger returns from its AI investments within the next three to six months.
The company is expected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, making it one of the biggest investors in the technology.
The spending is part of a bigger push by technology companies, which are projected to invest more than $700 billion in AI during the year.
During the same town hall, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, addressed concerns over the company’s controversial mouse-tracking software, which was suspended last month after a data security incident.
Bosworth said an internal review found that no employee data had been included in AI training.
He also said that if the software returns after the review is completed, employees will be able to choose whether to take part.
“For people who are comfortable, that’s great, they can contribute to this kind of great human survey. To people who are not, it is not an issue,” Bosworth said.
The software, introduced on employees’ computers in the United States in April, initially did not give staff the option to opt out. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the discussions at the town hall.
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