Meta Scraps "AI Native" Plan That Would Have Cut Some Teams 60 Percent
Meta earlier this year develops a plan, codenamed Project OT, that explores cutting some teams by as much as 60 percent as part of an effort to make the company "AI native," Reuters reports. The plan, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg sets in motion, envisions AI agents performing much of the daily work done by thousands of human employees, with small teams of people overseeing the AI. Meta confirms the scenario planning exercise but says it never intends to act on every scenario.
According to Reuters, which reviews internal documents and speaks with more than 20 people familiar with Meta's inner workings, Project OT calls for two rounds of layoffs. The first round occurs in May, but Meta cancels the second. The company ultimately moves thousands of employees to newly established priority teams instead of executing the full reduction. Meta declines to confirm which teams the project affects.
The report highlights the broader challenges organizations face as they weigh where AI fits better than human workers, and how disruptive large-scale AI-driven restructuring can be. Meta frames the effort as a standard scenario planning exercise, but the scale of the proposed cuts—60 percent for some teams—illustrates how aggressively major tech companies consider replacing human labor with AI agents.