Meta plans to fire 10 percent of its global workforce this Wednesday. The company wants to completely rebuild its corporate structure to focus on artificial intelligence. Chief People Officer Janelle Gale sent an internal memo to all staff on Monday explaining the upcoming job cuts and massive team transfers.
The social media giant employed exactly 77,986 people at the end of March. This sweeping new plan will impact roughly 20 percent of that entire workforce through a mix of direct layoffs and forced team changes. To save even more money, Meta also permanently closed 6,000 open job postings that recruiters were trying to fill.
Gale told workers the company will move 7,000 current employees to brand-new artificial intelligence projects. Many frustrated staffers jokingly refer to this mandatory transfer process as getting drafted. These transferred workers will join newly formed groups like Applied AI Engineering and the Agent Transformation Accelerator.
These new technology departments share one main goal. Executives want them to build smart artificial intelligence agents that can automatically perform the daily tasks that human workers currently handle. Another new team, called Central Analytics, will measure exactly how well these digital agents work and track their daily productivity. Gale also promised to share details soon about another new initiative called Enterprise Solutions.
To make the company move faster, Meta executives plan to eliminate thousands of middle management jobs. Gale noted that department leaders designed their new groups using native artificial intelligence principles. This means smaller groups of workers will operate independently with far fewer bosses checking their daily progress. Meta believes this flatter structure will force employees to take more direct ownership of their projects.
Because the massive job cuts happen this Wednesday, the company ordered all North American employees to work from home for the day. A Meta spokesperson completely refused to answer any questions from the press about the exact details of the firing process.
Workers are furious about the sudden changes and new surveillance tactics. Over 1,000 employees signed a company-wide petition protesting a controversial new piece of tracking technology. Meta recently installed mouse-tracking software on employee computers to watch exactly how humans click, type, and scroll through their screens.
The company uses this invasive tracking data to train its new artificial intelligence models. Meta wants the software to learn how to replicate normal human computer interactions. Employees printed protest flyers and filled the internal message board, known as Workplace, with angry complaints about the tracking. They openly attacked the executive team for completely ignoring basic workplace privacy concerns.
Staff members also criticized their bosses for staying totally silent for an entire month after news reporters first leaked the layoff plans. To make their point clear, angry workers spammed executive message boards with pictures of real elephants. They used the pictures to demand the leadership team finally address the obvious elephant in the room.
This massive restructuring highlights a growing trend across the tech industry this year. Companies now spend billions of dollars to build smart software while simultaneously firing the human workers who built their original products. Meta promises even deeper job cuts will happen later this year as the company continues to replace human roles with automated artificial intelligence agents.
