By Katie Paul
NEW YORK, May 18 (Reuters) - Meta detailed its layoff plans for this week in a memo shared with employees on Monday, saying cuts to its workforce globally would be accompanied by a fresh round of organizational changes aimed at improving the company's AI workflows.
The Facebook owner is planning to lay off 10% of its employees on Wednesday, with additional deep cuts slated to come later this year, Reuters reported previously.
In the memo, which was seen by Reuters, Meta Chief People Officer
Janelle Gale told employees the company plans to move 7,000 employees to new initiatives related to AI workflows and to eliminate managerial roles.
In addition, "many leaders will announce org changes," she said.
"As org leaders worked on the changes, many of them incorporated AI native design principles into their new org structures. We're now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership."
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the plan.
AI OVERHAUL DRIVES RESTRUCTURING
The changes are part of a far-reaching overhaul planned at Meta this year, as the company surges its AI investments in a bid to center AI agents in both its product offerings and its approach to work internally.
They reflect a broader pattern of AI-linked job cuts among major U.S. companies this year, particularly in the tech sector.
In total, the layoffs and transfers will hit about 20% of the company's workforce. Some of the transfers have already happened, while in other cases employees will be notified on Wednesday, Gale said in her memo. Employees in North America were told to work from home on Wednesday.
Meta has also closed an additional 6,000 open roles as part of the process, she told employees in an earlier memo.
Headcount at the social media giant was 77,986 employees at the end of March, according to company filings.
EMPLOYEE TRANSFERS TO AI UNITS
New initiatives where Gale said employees were being transferred — or "drafted," as many staffers refer to it — include Applied AI Engineering (AAI) and Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA) XFN, two teams previously announced by CTO Andrew Bosworth as part of Meta's "AI for Work" efforts.
Both are aimed at developing AI agents that can autonomously carry out tasks currently performed by human staffers.
Central Analytics, also a destination for transfer, was likewise mentioned in Bosworth's earlier announcement and would aim to measure productivity and analytics for agent development.
Details on another new initiative called Enterprise Solutions would be shared soon, Gale said.
The changes have prompted a revolt from Meta employees, who have been protesting the moves with flyers at the company’s offices and in angry posts on its internal communications platform, Workplace.
More than 1,000 employees have signed a petition decrying the installation of mouse-tracking software for use in training Meta's artificial intelligence models to help them replicate how humans interact with computers.
Others have been openly tangling with company leaders, criticizing executives for dismissing privacy concerns about the mouse-tracking tech and for staying silent about layoff plans for more than a month after Reuters first reported them.
During that month, many employees took to responding to executives' posts on Workplace with pictures of elephants, imploring them to address the layoffs, the so-called elephant in the room, according to examples seen by Reuters.
(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)
