Meta's Mark Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged shortcomings in the company's sweeping restructuring at an internal town hall on Thursday, saying the systems known as AI agents had not progressed as quickly as he had expected, according to a recording heard by Reuters.
Zuckerberg added that a company reorganization that included major job cuts was not as "clean" as it could have been and that executives had miscalculated on the timing of the changes.
Zuckerberg and other Meta executives have been seeking to moderate some of the organizational changes introduced earlier this year, without fundamentally changing course. The company laid off about 10% of its global workforce and reassigned roughly 7,000 employees to AI-focused teams in May, moves that prompted employee pushback and raised concerns about morale.
The changes were part of a broader restructuring aimed at funding costly investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure and positioning Meta to capitalize on efficiency gains from AI-assisted work. Zuckerberg told employees in May that he did not expect further companywide layoffs this year, though some workers were skeptical.
In retrospect, he 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 was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.
Conversations he was having "with our top people" when they started planning the restructuring in January and February "were that they were worried that we weren't going to move fast enough to adapt," Zuckerberg said.
