![\"In](\"https:\/\/static.toiimg.com\/thumb\/msid-133570337,width-400,height-225,resizemode-4\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity-data-didnt-hold-up.jpg\" "\\"Meta")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nMeta explored cutting some of its teams by as much as 60 per cent and handing their work to AI agents, according to a Reuters special report on the company’s 2026 restructuring. The plan, code-named Project OT for Organization Transformation, imagined an AI-native Meta in which software did much of the daily work at the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp parent, with a small core of high performers left to supervise it. What Meta actually got was 8,000 layoffs in May, a workforce in revolt, and a second round of job cuts cancelled at the last minute.Project OT came out of Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>‘s January leadership retreat at his Hawaii compound and was built to run in two waves, one in May and one in November. Only the first landed. On the night of May 19, hours before the Meta layoffs began, Zuckerberg called off planning for the November wave, Reuters reported, citing internal documents and more than 20 people familiar with the company’s inner workings. Meta went ahead the next morning and cut 8,000 jobs, roughly 10 per cent of its 78,000 staff. Meta has confirmed Project OT existed and acknowledged the 60 per cent scenarios, while saying it never intended to cut 60 per cent of the whole company.<\/p>\n The structural half of the plan was the more radical one. Internal Meta posts described replacing traditional product teams of 10 to 20 specialists with pods of three to five people, everyone carrying the same generic title of builder. Layers of middle management would go. Unit heads would each oversee 30 to 50 employees, while pod leads ran daily work without formal authority. Meta’s HR team also built a tool to identify irreplaceable talent, reviving the old Silicon Valley belief in the engineer who does the work of ten. By June, at least 11 units had adopted the pod structure.<\/p>\n The AI surveillance broke it first. In April, Meta told US employees their keystrokes, mouse clicks and screens would be captured so its AI models could learn how people complete real tasks on a computer. Chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told staff there was no opt-out on a corporate laptop. More than 1,000 Meta employees signed a petition against the tracking. Flyers went up in offices and bathrooms, and staff replied to executive posts with pictures of elephants. Meta’s internal Pulse survey registered the damage, with favourable sentiment falling from 74 per cent to 55 per cent. Engineers reassigned to a new Applied AI Engineering unit, writing coding puzzles as AI training data, described the work as rote.<\/p>\n Then the numbers turned. Bosworth posted in early June that code changes to Meta’s internal platforms were up 220 per cent year on year, while changes that shipped a new or improved feature to users rose only 36 per cent. Infrastructure teams had flagged reliability warnings as early as March, and an April post described AI agents taking large, disruptive actions humans would not attempt. Major technical and security incidents climbed 40 per cent and firefighting time rose 70 per cent, per internal posts seen by Reuters. In June, attackers exploited Meta’s new AI support bot to reach high-profile Instagram accounts, including the dormant Obama White House page.At a July town hall, Zuckerberg conceded AI agent technology had not accelerated as fast as he expected and asked for three to six more months. Meta has since paused the tracking, improved the office snacks and run a campaign about betting on people. It is also still committing at least $130 billion, about Rs 11.4 lakh crore, to AI infrastructure this year. And his assurance of no further layoffs arrived with two qualifiers attached: company-wide, and this year.<\/div>\n Meta explored 60% team cuts and AI replacements under Project OT; staff revolted and the productivity data didn’t hold up Meta explored cutting some of its teams by as much as 60 per cent and handing their work to AI agents, according to a Reuters special report on the company’s 2026 restructuring. The plan, code-named […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-31"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity-150x150.avif","medium":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity-300x169.avif","medium_large":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","large":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","1536x1536":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","2048x2048":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","blogsy-small":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","blogsy-small-tall":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","blogsy-small-square":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","blogsy-small-masonry":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","blogsy-medium":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","blogsy-medium-masonry":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","blogsy-large":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif","blogsy-wide":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif"},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"admin","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8709732a479614e7a8aa24d3eb1b239f30dc6d90c61464ed495001e7a469d856?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":"0","magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"Meta explored 60% team cuts and AI replacements under Project OT; staff revolted and the productivity data didn’t hold up Meta explored cutting some of its teams by as much as 60 per cent and handing their work to AI agents, according to a Reuters special report on the company’s 2026 restructuring. The plan, code-named […]","magazineBlocksPostCategories":["\u0b26\u0b47\u0b36 \u0b2c\u0b3f\u0b26\u0b47\u0b36"],"magazineBlocksPostViewCount":1,"magazineBlocksPostReadTime":4,"magazine_blocks_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity.avif",400,225,false],"medium":["https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity-300x169.avif",300,169,true],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/meta-explored-60-team-cuts-and-ai-replacements-under-project-ot-staff-revolted-and-the-productivity-150x150.avif",150,150,true]},"magazine_blocks_author":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/author\/admin"},"magazine_blocks_comment":0,"magazine_blocks_author_image":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8709732a479614e7a8aa24d3eb1b239f30dc6d90c61464ed495001e7a469d856?s=96&d=mm&r=g","magazine_blocks_category":"\u0b26\u0b47\u0b36 \u0b2c\u0b3f\u0b26\u0b47\u0b36<\/a>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Project OT was designed to delete Meta’s org chart, not just trim headcount<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
Meta’s employee tracking programme for AI training is what tipped staff into revolt<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
Meta’s own AI productivity data never justified the AI restructuring<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"