Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that the company's push into AI agents has not accelerated as quickly as executives had hoped, and that the sweeping reorganisation accompanying it was not as smooth as it should have been, according to a Reuters report.
Agentic development trajectory falls short of expectations
Speaking at an internal town hall, Zuckerberg told employees that the pace of AI agent development over the past four months "hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected." Reuters cited a recording of the meeting to report that Zuckerberg has accepted that the bets the company placed on its restructured organisation 'haven't come to fruition yet.'
Restructuring called 'not clean,' timing miscalculated
Zuckerberg admitted that the company's reorganisation, which included major job cuts, was not as 'clean' as it could have been, and that executives had miscalculated the timing of the changes, Reuters reported. He said conversations with senior leaders while planning the restructuring in January and February reflected concerns that Meta 'weren't going to move fast enough to adapt.' At the time, he said, executives were "super optimistic" about tools such as Claude Code from Anthropic, according to the report.
Meta laid off about 10 percent of its global workforce and reassigned roughly 7,000 employees to AI-focused teams in May, moves that Reuters said had prompted employee pushback and raised concerns about morale.
Zuckerberg expects benefits within three to six months
Despite the setbacks, Zuckerberg told employees he expects Meta to begin seeing more significant benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the remarks, according to the report. The company is projected to spend as much as 145 billion dollars on AI infrastructure this year, part of a broader wave of AI spending across the technology industry that is expected to exceed 700 billion dollars, Reuters said.
CTO addresses mouse-tracking data concerns
At the same town hall, Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth addressed a recent data security incident involving the company's employee mouse-tracking software, saying an internal review found that no employee data had been included in AI training, according to Reuters. Meta paused the programme, which tracks employee mouse movements and digital activity for AI training purposes, last month while investigating the exposure of sensitive data.
Bosworth said that if the programme resumes once the review is complete, it will operate on an 'opt-in' basis. "For people who are comfortable, that's great, they can contribute to this kind of great human survey. To people who are not, it is not an issue," he told employees, according to Reuters. When Meta first installed the software on US employees' computers in April, Bosworth had told them there was no way to opt out.
