Mark Zuckerberg has told Meta employees that the company’s push into AI agents has not accelerated as quickly as expected, leaving a sweeping reorganisation that included thousands of job cuts yet to deliver its promised returns, according to a recording of an internal town hall heard by Reuters.
Based on a report by Reuters on the matter, the chief executive said the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg acknowledged that the restructuring, which saw around 10% of the global workforce laid off and roughly 7,000 staff reassigned to AI-focused teams in May, was not as “clean” as it could have been and that executives had miscalculated on timing.
He recalled that during planning in January and February, senior leaders were “super optimistic” about tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and “worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt.” Zuckerberg now expects more significant benefits from the company’s AI investments within the next three to six months. Meta is projected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year.
At the same town hall, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said a review of the company’s controversial mouse-tracking software, which logs employee digital activity for AI training, found no staff data had been used in model training, according to Reuters. If reinstated after the review, the programme will be opt-in only, he said, reversing an earlier policy that gave employees no choice. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the town hall remarks.