By Katie Paul
NEW YORK, June 17 (Reuters) - A Meta executive overseeing a key piece of its restructuring around AI agents is leaving the company, according to an internal announcement seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
Emily Dalton Smith, who has been with the Facebook owner since 2015, previously held roles as a vice president of product management and head of product for Meta's Twitter-like microblogging app Threads.
Her departure comes about two months after Meta told employees she would be leading product
work to improve internal AI tooling as part of a company-wide overhaul to center AI agents in both its products and its approach to work.
Her unit, or "pod," would be focused on "the interfaces, platform components, memory systems, automations and shared product experiences that make AI useful for everyone," Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said at the time.
That included responsibility for Metamate, Meta's main internal enterprise AI assistant.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on whether Dalton Smith was leaving the company, but said the company was continuing to incorporate AI tooling into Metamate.
Dalton Smith told Meta employees in a memo last month that executives were aiming to consolidate the company's internal-use AI tools into Metamate, recognizing that its existing set of tools was fragmented.
"Our goal is to make Metamate the starting point for all kinds of work — from doing deep research to prototyping a new feature to putting together a sales presentation," she wrote.
Her team was planning to pull in functionality from AI systems that can navigate work files, enable coding coordination from chats, and retain "persistent memory" of people's work, she said.
She said the team would also incorporate "polished dashboards and microsites" including those from Manus, a Singapore-based AI agent startup Meta acquired for around $2 billion in December.
The inclusion of Manus-like features in the project has made it especially sensitive, as the Chinese government ordered the unwinding of the deal in April and Meta subsequently cut off the tool's access to its internal systems while working through its response.
Dalton Smith said in her memo that her team was expecting the new features to be available inside Metamate as of June 1.
In her announcement on Wednesday, she said that she would stay on at Meta to work with Bosworth until they had completed the transition to her replacement.
(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Franklin Paul; Jan Harvey and Edmund Klamann)
