Meta abandons 'AI native' plan, had planned to cut some teams by 60%

PANews reported on August 27, according to Reuters, that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had secretly formulated a “Project OT” plan to cut some teams by as much as 60% in order to build an “AI native” workforce. However, the plan was not implemented; the company only carried out layoffs of about 10% in May before canceling the second round of restructuring. The plan included splitting teams into smaller “small groups” to reduce management layers and using AI tools to improve efficiency, with the human resources department responsible for finding irreplaceable employees who could “do the work of ten.” But employees expressed aversion to internal AI project mistakes and monitoring measures such as keyboard and mouse activity logging, and AI agents and coding tools also failed to improve productivity as expected. Zuckerberg admitted last month that AI agent technology progress had not met expectations, but said he believed it would improve in the next 3 to 6 months. Meta responded that the plan was a “scenario-planning exercise,” and that some of it involved employee reassignment.