Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that the company’s effort to reshape its workforce around artificial intelligence (AI) has not gone perfectly. He said that the tech giant has made mistakes during the transformation. In an internal memo accessed by Reuters, Zuckerberg said that the rapid growth of AI and the scale of changes at the company have created certain challenges for them.
“Given the complexity of these changes, we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more,” Zuckerberg said. He added that Meta is focused on providing as much “stability” as possible for employees as the company continues with its AI transformation.
The comments come as Meta has already been investing heavily in AI and reorganising teams to support its long-term strategy. The company is spending billions of dollars on AI infrastructure and development as competition in the sector intensifies.
Zuckerberg further sought to reassure employees that Meta won’t be doing any more company-wide layoffs at least this year, although he pointed out that the fast-changing nature of the technological world makes it difficult to predict the future. He said, “I don’t want to overpromise because the world is changing in ways that are out of our control.”
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Earlier this year, Meta laid off about 10% of its global workforce and moved around 7,000 employees into AI-related roles and projects. The Meta CEO said that the company will try to find new positions for employees who were reassigned to help train AI models.
“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 shared.
The memo also addressed employee concerns about management structures. Zuckerberg said that Meta has taken note of the growing concerns over manager oversight responsibilities and plans to reduce the practice.
The report revealed that some of Meta’s AI teams were operating with unusually high ratios of employees to managers, with its new Applied AI Engineering team having a 50:1 ratio of individual contributors to managers.
To support employees during the transition, Meta also plans to increase spending on team-building activities, which will include larger budgets for off-site meetings and company events. The tech company is also planning a major hackathon in July to encourage collaboration on its latest AI projects.
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