According to a recent Reuters report, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that his plan to unplug 60 percent of the company’s pesky human workforce in favor of AI has crashed and burned. After laying of approximately 10 percent of Meta’s workforce in May, the company was flooded with angry online rants from former employees. In addition, employees filed lawsuits alleging AI-aided discrimination in firing workers with disabilities, there were complaints about plans to install AI-training spyware on remaining employees’ computers, and other collateral damage that comes from forgetting you employ actual people with needs and feelings and such.
In addition, Zuckerberg’s planned AI revolution has allowed malicious, AI-generated code to proliferate across Meta’s platforms, necessitating teams of those darned humans to try to fix things. In short, Zuckerberg’s grand “Organizational Transformation” plan (because all tech stuff has to have super-cool names) has fizzled, with no resulting increase in revenue, a PR nightmare and plenty of headaches. Not even Zuck-mandated team building and promises of better human snacks could quell what the article terms Meta’s “employee rebellion.”
Even as Zuckerberg admitted that his “AI-native playbook” was stalled in a morass of unmet expectations and understandable ire, Meta maintains that scrapping humanity from the workforce is still very much on the table. Even if, as a spokesperson confusingly explains of the aborted 60 percent roster cuts once so loftily extolled by Meta’s founder, “Ultimately, we didn’t move forward with every scenario from the exercise — and it was never assumed we would.”
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