In a recent memo to employees, Meta has detailed its plans for the restructuring that is set to occur on May 20. The Facebook parent company, which has been increasingly reshaping itself in recent months around artificial intelligence, is now readying itself to cut a hunk of ten percent of its global employees from the payroll starting Wednesday, with additional cuts expected later this year. The changes are not just about job cuts, the memo to Reuters said. Rather, Meta plans to relocate approximately 7,000 staffers to new initiatives focused on AI workflows and eliminate management layers at the same time. As it’s formulated on the inside, the objective is to create a leaner, more agile organization, based on small, independent teams that work with autonomy, with more ownership and less bureaucracy.
It doesn’t feel like the tech companies I’ve seen over the last few years promising an AI transformation.It’s not the tech companies I’ve seen over the last few years promising an AI transformation. Not a pilot or experimental lab. This is the complete reorganisation of a social media giant, which will be shedding of the order of 20 per cent of its staff. The human aspect of that statistic is amazing. If you consider the people that work on the system interfaces, the people who’ve been responsible for content moderation queues, or the people who’ve been responsible for partner support, many of them are waking up this week to a very different professional future. But strategically, that’s what Meta has been telling investors that it will do – focus AI agents on its products and its work.
The memo, which was penned by Meta Chief People Officer Janelle Gale, provides a stark, albeit disturbing, look at the future ahead for the employees. Many leaders will make organizational announcements as part of this drive, and the leaders have been invited to integrate what Meta calls “AI native design principles” into their new organization, she wrote. This should create an “organisation by flatter” structure where smaller teams are called pods or cohorts. As the org leaders were making the changes, many included AI native design principles in their new org structures, and now they are at the point where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure, smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move quicker and with more ownership, Gale explained. Such a language, a telling language. It implies that Meta is more than just downsizing, it’s also reimagining the process of work as it moves through the organization, where AI is the solution and also the guiding principle.
This overhaul isn’t done alone. The tech industry has been trimming capital expenditure and restructuring teams—the world’s largest firms are doing so, from Facebook to Google, Airtable to Optimizely, and many others—in their respective efforts to leverage generative AI, automation, and machine-learning systems that eliminate some human coordination efforts. But it’s one of the most radical moves by Meta. The company is essentially resetting its workforce for a new era by combining layoffs, internal transfers and the closing of about six thousand open roles. The transfers and layoffs, combined, will impact about 20% of Meta’s workforce of 77,986 at the end of March, according to company filings. Those transfers have already been carried out in a subtle manner. The rest will be notified on Wednesday. The decision to have employees work from home on the day has been designed to avoid awkwardness in packing boxes in front of their colleagues, but is also meant to create greater anonymity in the process of a remote restructuring.
The internal mood is the part that makes this round very sensitive. There had been some employee resistance to a new program even before the memo was sent out: mouse-tracking technology to track productivity. A petition against that tracking tool has now been signed by more than a thousand of the files’ internal supporters, an impressive tally considering the risks that employees deal with in signing anything that can be construed as important. It mirrors a general level of anxiety. Individuals are noticing their work shifts, their bosses are being eliminated, and their job security is reducing—while AI is supposed to make everything better. When it comes with a layoff notice, for many the promise rings hollow.
In a typical gesture from a company going through a sensitive transition, a Meta spokesperson did not comment further on the plan. But the hush does only accentuate the tension. From one perspective, it is a sound business decision for Meta. The company has invested billions of dollars in AI, and making a change based on that investment makes sense. Yes, flatter structures can move faster. Pod-based teams can be more autonomous and innovative. The idea of this restructuring makes sense in that it will help Meta to become more competitive in the long run, particularly with other companies such as Google, Microsoft and a slew of AI startups jockeying themselves for the same talent and market opportunities.
