Project OT would have handed much of Meta's daily work to AI agents. It ran into two things at once: agents that were not delivering, and a workforce that had worked out what the plan meant for it.
The blueprint was drawn up in January at Meta's annual leadership retreat at Zuckerberg's Hawaii compound, Reuters reported. Known inside the company as Project OT — short for Organization Transformation — it imagined an AI-native Meta in which software absorbed much of what thousands of staff do each day, with virtual workers overseen by smaller, talent-dense groups of humans. Executives weighed shrinking numerous teams across the company by up to 60%.
The overhaul was laid out as two rounds, a purge in May and a shake-up in November. Only the first went ahead, cutting about 10% of the company's staff; Zuckerberg scrapped the preparations for the second on the evening of May 19, hours before the first layoff notices went out.
The technology the plan rested on was not delivering, according to internal numbers reported by Reuters. In a post at the beginning of June, chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, who ran the AI transformation, said code changes to the tooling and back-end systems Meta runs for itself were up 220% year over year, while changes that reached users as new or better features were up only 36%. Internal posts show serious technical and security failures, including outages and suspected data leaks, climbing 40% from a year earlier, and the hours staff spent handling them rising 70%. Meta would not discuss those figures with the news agency.
The workforce, meanwhile, was in open revolt, convinced the AI drive was partly meant to replace it. The suspicion was sharpened by an order, reported by Reuters in April, requiring monitoring software on U.S. workers' devices to record keystrokes and clicks so Meta's AI agents could learn to imitate how people use computers. Internal sentiment in Pulse, the twice-yearly staff survey, slid from 74% favorable to 55%, and labor organizing gained momentum over the same stretch.
Meta confirmed Project OT, calling it a year-long effort to cut costs, rebuild how teams are organized and move people into new priority areas. It said the most extreme scenarios covered redeployments as well as job cuts, that it never planned to cut 60% of its total workforce, and that leaders dropped the second stage before working out how many jobs it would have eliminated.
The reversal came quickly. The mouse-tracking program was suspended and some Applied AI Engineering staff were allowed back to their old teams. At the start of July, Reuters reported, Zuckerberg appeared unannounced at an internal town hall and conceded he had misjudged the timing, saying the agent technology had gained speed more slowly than he expected.
He has attached two qualifiers — company-wide, this year — whenever he has discussed layoffs internally, which has left some employees guessing he could keep trimming headcount through cuts confined to individual teams or dismissals tied to performance, or hold company-wide reductions until next year.
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