Meta made AI workforce mistakes, no further layoffs planned this year: Zuckerberg

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged mistakes in the company’s AI-driven workforce restructuring and said no further company-wide layoffs are expected this year. He promised greater organisational stability while highlighting ongoing investments in AI development and employee redeployment.

New Delhi: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told employees that the company made “mistakes” in reshaping its workforce around artificial intelligence, adding that further company‑wide layoffs are not expected this year.

Zuckerberg pledged to provide greater stability as possible” in terms of organisation changes going forward, multiple reports said.

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“I don’t want to over promise because the world is changing in ways that are out of our control,” he said, adding that rapid advances in AI have created complex challenges and that Meta will “almost certainly make more” mistakes as it adapts.

Zuckerberg said that the company’s management is focused on finding new roles for employees reassigned to train AI models. In a restructuring in May, Meta had cut about 10 per cent of the workforce and moved roughly 7,000 staff into AI‑related initiatives.

“By creating important new roles for people, this also allowed us to shrink the size of teams knowing that if we make mistakes in some places, then we could transfer some people back,” Zuckerberg wrote, in an internal memo to employees.

He informed about the company’s plans to increase investment in team-building initiatives, through higher budgets for offsites and corporate events. It will organise a large-scale hackathon in July to strengthen cross-team collaboration and development on its latest models.

Meta has also taken note of concerns over the expansion of manager oversight responsibilities and plans to scale back the practice, he added.

Meanwhile, major companies including Uber, Meta, Cloudflare, Intuit, PayPal, Cisco, Quora and Coinbase implemented mass layoffs this year.

Several tech industry leaders have said that most white‑collar roles that rely on computers could be automated within the next 12 to 18 months.

Generative AI is not causing widespread job displacement in India’s IT sector but is reorganising work, raising productivity and shifting demand toward hybrid skill sets, a recent report said.