Meta is reshaping its workforce by moving approximately 7,000 employees into four newly established AI groups, a move designed to accelerate its development of AI-driven products. This internal shift reflects the company’s growing emphasis on artificial intelligence, even as it prepares to lay off roughly 8,000 staff members, about 10% of its total workforce.
The reassigned employees will focus on building applications based on "AI native design structures," implementing flatter management to streamline workflows. Meanwhile, affected staff were notified early in the morning and instructed to work remotely during the transition. US employees facing layoffs will receive a severance package of at least 16 weeks, complemented by two additional weeks per year of tenure.
This reorganization signals CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s strategic realignment away from the metaverse and toward artificial intelligence. Meta has committed up to $135 billion this year to expand its AI infrastructure and data centers in an effort to compete with other tech giants such as Google and OpenAI. Zuckerberg has projected that AI will profoundly transform workplace dynamics by 2026, underscoring the company’s large-scale investment in this sector.
As part of this AI push, Meta has started evaluating employees partly based on their use of AI tools, a policy that has generated internal concern, especially regarding the use of worker data to train AI models. Industry observers have described the company’s approach as unusually assertive compared to its Silicon Valley peers.
Meta is not alone in this trend; other technology firms like Cisco, Microsoft, Block, and Coinbase have recently announced their own AI-driven workforce reorganizations, reflecting a broader industry shift toward integrating artificial intelligence into core operations.