Meta reportedly explored cutting some teams by up to 60 per cent under a plan to become “AI native”, with AI agents taking on work previously done by thousands of employees. The subsequently abandoned initiative illustrates the practical and organisational difficulties of replacing staff with AI, including uncertainty over whether automation can reliably handle day-to-day work at scale.

The plan, codenamed Project OT, was created in January and considered two rounds of redundancies, although Meta says it did not adopt every scenario and cancelled the project before fixing a total number of job cuts. Reuters reported that one scenario could have reduced Meta’s workforce by roughly 25 per cent or more, while savings were intended partly to reward high-performing staff with AI engineering skills. A first round of layoffs reportedly occurred in May, but a planned November round was cancelled amid falling morale, concerns over employee monitoring to train AI, and uncertainty about expanded AI use.