META
Zuck tried to replace over half his staff with AI. It backfired.
This January, Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle gathered at his Hawaiian compound to set Project OT into motion. (Cue dramatic music).
Projected Organization Transformation was a radical plan to shift Meta into an “AI-native” business model. With digital agents handling a majority of the routine, the tech giant would drastically scale back its workforce and flatten its org chart. Traditional job titles like engineer and product designer would disappear. Instead of hierarchical management structures, there would be pods, with employees given the new generic role of “builder.”
As you might imagine, this didn’t go over well.
How the plan backfired:
Project OT: Meta explored two rounds of layoffs that would eventually shrink the teams by 60%. The first May wave — which cut 10% of staff —caused major internal pushback. The second round never happened.
Mismatched results: AI helped drive internal work up by 220%...but only 36% of that was usable improvements. Read: coding surged, but product progress did not.
The fallout: Major technical and security incidents jumped 40%, while time spent fixing the damage rose 70%. The journey to becoming AI-native became pretty dang costly.
The human override
After Reuters caught wind that Meta was planning mass layoffs back in March, employees became outwardly nervous that the company was training systems meant to replace them. I
nternal sentiment fell from 74% to 55% favorable (as reported by a team morale survey) and employee petitions began circulating amongst staff.
By May, just hours before Meta cut 10% of its workforce, Zuckerberg canceled a second round of layoffs under Project OT. The first round continued as planned.
Meaning 8,000 people lost their jobs, but the aforementioned company-wide restructuring didn’t take place. As of last month, Meta said its AI agents had not advanced as quickly as expected.
So, just to get this straight: Thousands of people lost their jobs, for technology that wasn’t ready to take the wheel. All because Zuck got ahead of himself.
He put the cart before the chatbot. - TL