Zuckerberg Tells Staff AI Agents Aren't Progressing as Fast as He'd Hoped

At an internal town hall, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted AI agent development has not "accelerated in the way" executives expected, despite $145 billion in planned AI infrastructure spending and a sweeping restructure that cut 8,000 jobs.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees at an internal town hall Thursday that the company's push to replace human workers with AI agents isn't going to plan — the technology hasn't "accelerated in the way" executives had hoped when they restructured the company earlier this year.

The admission, first reported by Reuters and expanded on by TechCrunch, comes after Meta laid off roughly 8,000 employees — about 10% of its corporate workforce — and reassigned another 7,000 to AI-specific groups, including one called Agent Transformation.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the job cuts were not as "clean" as they should have been, and conceded that the perceived upside of the AI-focused restructuring hasn't "come to fruition yet." He told staff he expects improvements within three to six months.

Meta is spending up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. Multiple investigative reports have described the company's months-old AI unit as a grueling environment, with some engineers comparing it to a "soul-crushing gulag."

The candid internal assessment marks a rare moment of public doubt from a Big Tech CEO about the near-term viability of AI agents — a category the entire industry has bet billions on. If the company spending more on AI than almost anyone else can't make agents work at scale yet, the entire industry's timeline may need recalibrating.

Sources: Reuters, TechCrunch