Meta shifts staff to AI while cutting jobs

Meta is shifting a large number of staff into artificial intelligence work while also reducing its payroll. The company is reassigning 7,000 employees into new AI-focused groups and plans to lay off about 8,000 people as it pauses hiring for roughly 6,000 open roles. Janelle Gale, the Chief People Officer, outlined the changes in a memo that said many leaders will announce organizational changes.

The reassigned staff will join initiatives such as Applied AI Engineering, the Agent Transformation Accelerator, and Central Analytics, teams that aim to build AI agents and measure productivity for agent development. Meta has redesigned its structure to be flatter, with smaller pods intended to move faster and take more ownership, which the company says will improve productivity and job satisfaction.

Employees have reacted strongly; protests and petitions have appeared on internal platforms, and more than 1,000 workers signed a petition over plans to use mouse-tracking software to train models. Workers have asked for clearer explanations of how monitoring tools will be used and what support will be available for those who are cut.

Notifications are scheduled to be sent on May 20, and North American staff were told to work from home that day. The company had about 77,986 employees at the end of March, so these moves will affect a meaningful share of the workforce and follow a broader pattern of AI-linked restructuring in the tech sector. Meta has also closed about 6,000 open roles to offset its AI investments. These steps are intended to free funds for AI infrastructure and model development.