Meta Planned to Fire Thousands Until AI Agents Failed to Deliver

Meta initially planned to drastically reduce its workforce as part of Project OT, or Organization Transformation, which aimed to replace employee jobs with AI agents. This internal project was designed at Mark Zuckerberg's Hawaii compound in January, with two waves of restructuring scheduled for May and November. The goal was to let AI agents handle routine tasks, leaving a smaller group of "talent-dense" workers to supervise the AI systems.

However, despite spending a year developing the plan, Meta's AI systems failed to deliver the expected improvements, leading to the cancellation of the November restructuring phase on May 19. Zuckerberg later cancelled the second wave altogether, but Meta still proceeded with 8,000 job cuts, or approximately 10% of its workforce.

Project OT ultimately resulted in thousands of employees moving to AI-related roles, but the AI agents did not generate much useful output. Internal performance data showed a significant gap between the amount of work AI agents produced and what actually resulted in useful products. The increased AI activity also caused reliability and security issues, including service disruptions, data leaks, and hacking incidents.

Meta employees grew increasingly concerned that they were training their replacements, leading to internal frustration and a declining employee sentiment score.