Meta sent employees detailed layoff plans on Monday, which will begin this week. The cuts will affect employees around the world and will be accompanied by another round of organizational changes to streamline the company’s AI workflows. In total, the changes will affect 20% of the tech giant’s workforce.
Meta sent employees detailed layoff plans on Monday, which will begin this week. The cuts will affect employees around the world and will be accompanied by another round of organizational changes to streamline the company’s AI workflows. In total, the changes will affect 20% of the tech giant’s workforce.
In a memo seen by Reuters , Meta's chief human resources officer, Janelle Gale, told employees that the company plans to redeploy 7,000 employees to new AI workflow initiatives and eliminate management positions.
In addition, she said, "many executives will announce structural changes."
“As we work through these changes, many business leaders have integrated AI design principles into their new organizational structures. We are now at a point where many departments can operate in a flatter structure—with smaller teams, such as pods or cohorts, that can move faster and have more autonomy.”
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the plan.
These changes are part of a major reorganization planned at Meta this year, as the company rapidly increases its investment in AI, seeking to integrate AI agents into both its products and internal workflows.
In total, the layoffs and transfers will affect about 20% of the company's workforce. Some of the transfers have already taken place, while others will be announced on Wednesday, Gale said. Employees in North America were ordered to work from home on Wednesday.
Meta also closed another 6,000 open positions as part of this process.
According to the company's reporting, at the end of March, the number of employees of this social media giant was 77,986 people.
The new areas where Gale says employees are being moved — or “mobilized,” as many employees call it — include Applied AI Engineering and XFN’s Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA), both of which CTO Andrew Bosworth previously announced as part of Meta’s “AI for Work” effort.
Both projects aim to develop AI agents capable of autonomously performing tasks currently performed by humans.
The Central Analytics unit, where some staff are also being transferred, was also mentioned in Bosworth's previous announcement; its purpose will be to evaluate the performance and analytics of the agent development process.
Gail promised to share details about another new initiative called Enterprise Solutions in the near future.
These changes have sparked a revolt among Meta employees, who are protesting these moves by distributing flyers in the company's offices and posting angry posts on the internal communication platform Workplace.
More than 1,000 employees have signed a petition condemning the installation of mouse-tracking software, which is used to train Meta's artificial intelligence models to help them replicate how people interact with computers.
Other employees are openly arguing with the company's management, criticizing top managers for ignoring privacy concerns over mouse-tracking technology and for remaining silent about layoff plans for more than a month after Reuters first reported it.
This month, many employees have been responding to managers' posts on Workplace with images of elephants, urging them to finally address the dismissal — the so-called "elephant in the room" (an obvious issue that everyone is ignoring), according to examples seen by Reuters.
