Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said AI is transforming what a single employee can accomplish at a company, suggesting the company is adopting a new hiring strategy.
During an earnings call with analysts on Thursday, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said the company is investing more in AI-native tools to elevate individual contributors and flatten teams. However, this effort is somewhat constrained by the lack of computing resources.
“Projects that once required large teams are now being accomplished by a single, extremely talented person,” he said. “I want to make sure that as many of these incredibly talented people as possible choose the meta as a place where they can have the biggest impact.”
The Facebook and Instagram parent company reported fourth-quarter revenue and profits that beat Wall Street expectations and said it plans to increase AI spending by 60% to 87% this year. Mehta also said that the company has already seen a significant increase in output per engineer in the last year, with much of that increase coming from the introduction of agent coding.
Although the team is shrinking, Finance Director Susan Lee said on the earnings call that the company is still looking for top talent. “The job market remains very competitive, but we want to invest aggressively where we can,” she said.
Lee also noted that Meta ended the quarter ended December with a 6% increase in employees compared to the same period a year ago, driven by hiring drives in areas such as monetization, infrastructure, Meta Super Intelligence Lab, regulatory and compliance.
It’s not just the meta that focuses on small teams. This strategy has become popular in the startup world, where founders have long prioritized scrappiness. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that this trend would be subdued by February 2024.
“You’ll soon see 10-person companies valued at $1 billion,” he said at the time. “In a small group chat with my CEO friends in the tech industry, there is a betting pool for a single-person billion-dollar company in its first year of existence, which would have been unimaginable without AI. And now, [it] It will happen. ”
Meanwhile, large companies such as Amazon and Intel have shed middle management ranks in recent years to reduce bureaucracy and increase efficiency. Meta’s Zuckerberg wrote a memo titled “Flatter is fast” in 2023, and in late 2024, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that the company was cutting the roles of vice presidents and managers by 10% as part of an efficiency drive.
This trend is not limited to technology companies. Retailers like Walmart and Wayfair, as well as fintech companies like Block, are moving managers into non-executive roles. Some companies have implemented multiple mass layoffs. Amazon announced Wednesday that it will cut 16,000 employees, its second layoff in four months.
Meta acknowledged on the earnings call that its goal of relying on a small number of AI-savvy employees is challenged by a lack of computing resources as demand across the company grows faster than supply. Still, Zuckerberg expressed confidence in the prospects for further efficiency gains.
“I think 2026 will be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way we work,” he said. “As we navigate through this, our North Star is building the best place for individuals to make a big impact.”
