SPECIAL REPORT | Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI. Here’s how it imploded

In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants gathered for their annual leadership retreat at his Hawaii compound. There they hatched a radical plan to reimagine work at the social-media giant in the age of artificial intelligence.

Code-named Project OT — short for Organization Transformation — the plan envisioned an “AI native” future for the owner of Facebook and Instagram.

AI would take over much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees. Virtual workers would be overseen inside Meta by smaller, “talent-dense” cadres of human staffers, according to one internal planning document reviewed by Reuters and three people familiar with the project.

In scenario-planning exercises, two of these people said, executives explored slashing the size of many teams across Meta by as much as 60%. Some employees would be offered roles in new units, while others would be laid off as part of a culling that one human-resources executive projected would be as big as or bigger than the company’s cuts of around 25% three years ago, according to another internal document.

The restructuring would be carried out in two “waves”, beginning with a first purge in May and followed by another shake-up in November, internal planning documents seen by Reuters showed. Layoffs would be supplemented with the closing of open positions and pushing people out who Meta believed are poor performers. These and other details of the plan, including the scale of the restructuring, haven’t been previously reported.

But on the night of May 19, just hours before the first layoff wave, Zuckerberg blinked. Meta laid off 10% of its employees the next day, but it called off planning for the November cuts, according to one internal document reviewed by Reuters.

By then, Meta employees were in open revolt, convinced that the company’s AI transformation initiatives were partly aimed at replacing them. Internal data was also suggesting that autonomous AI “agent” technology at the heart of the strategy was failing to deliver hoped-for productivity gains. Some investors were questioning what Meta had to show for its gargantuan spending on AI.

This article reveals for the first time the rapid pace of the cuts Meta was considering, the thinking behind the plans and how they quickly unravelled. Based on scores of internal documents, posts and recordings reviewed by Reuters, as well as conversations with more than 20 people with knowledge of Meta’s inner workings, the reporting shows how the social-media giant attempted to position itself at the forefront of an AI-driven workplace overhaul, only to stumble in the execution.

In response to this story, Meta confirmed the existence of Project OT, which it described as a year-long project focused on cost cutting, redesigning team structures and shifting staff into new priority areas, such as producing training data for its AI models.

As part of our company restructuring earlier this year, we asked some teams to conduct a scenario planning exercise looking at the potential impact of redeployments, open role closures and cuts...