new york – Metaplatforms is reassigning 7,000 employees to new jobs related to artificial intelligence as part of a broader corporate restructuring that includes layoffs planned for later this week, according to an internal memo.
Employees will move to one of several new groups focused on AI-related products such as agents and apps, according to a May 18 memo from Chief Human Resources Officer Janelle Gale seen by Bloomberg.
The new corporate structure will be “flatter” and mean “smaller teams,” Gale wrote.
“We believe this will increase productivity and make work more rewarding,” she added.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority for the social media company and pivoted his team and resources to focus more on the fast-growing technology. A commitment to improving AI is central to Meta’s consumer products and Zuckerberg’s vision for the company.
Meta is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the talent and infrastructure needed to develop large-scale language models to power chatbots and other consumer-facing features, as part of an effort to compete with rivals such as Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI.
Meta also encourages its engineers to use AI agents to help with coding and other tasks, and Zuckerberg is even developing his own AI-powered tool to interact with employees.
Meta previously told staff it would cut 10 percent of its workforce, or about 8,000 people, on May 20 as part of efforts to improve efficiency and “offset” other investments in AI. The social media giant had 77,986 employees at the end of March, according to company filings.
North American employees were encouraged to work from home starting May 20, according to the memo.
Meta also closed an additional 6,000 open positions as part of the process.
New initiatives that Gale said have been “drafted,” or as many staff members refer to them, include Applied AI Engineering (AAI) and Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA) XFN, two teams previously announced by Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth as part of Meta’s “AI for Work” initiative.
Both aim to develop AI agents that can autonomously perform tasks currently performed by human staff.
Central Analytics, which will also be relocated, was similarly mentioned in Bosworth’s previous announcement and is intended to measure productivity and analytics for agent development.
Gale said details of another new initiative called Enterprise Solutions will be shared soon.
The change sparked a revolt among Meta’s employees, who protested the move by posting flyers in the company’s offices and posting angry posts on Workplace, an internal communications platform.
More than 1,000 employees have signed a petition opposing the installation of mouse-tracking software used to train Meta’s artificial intelligence models, which help replicate the way humans interact with computers.
Others have publicly clashed with company executives, criticizing them for ignoring privacy concerns about mouse-tracking technology and for remaining silent for more than a month after Reuters first reported the layoff plans.
During the month, many employees responded to posts by workplace executives with pictures of elephants, pleading with them to address the issue of layoffs, the so-called elephant in the room, according to examples seen by Reuters. Bloomberg, Reuters
