Meta’s Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected

NEW YORK – Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged shortcomings in the company’s sweeping restructuring at an internal town hall on July 2, saying the systems known as AI agents had not progressed as quickly as he had expected, according to a recording heard by Reuters.

Zuckerberg added that a company reorganisation that included major job cuts was not as “clean” as it could have been and that executives had miscalculated on the timing of the changes.

Zuckerberg and other Meta executives have been seeking to moderate some of the organisational changes introduced earlier in 2026, without fundamentally changing course.

The company laid off about 10 per cent of its global workforce and reassigned roughly 7,000 employees to AI-focused teams in May, moves that prompted employee pushback and raised concerns about morale.

The changes were part of a broader restructuring aimed at funding costly investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure and positioning Meta to capitalise on efficiency gains from AI-assisted work.

Zuckerberg told employees in May that he did not expect further companywide layoffs in 2026, though some workers were sceptical.

In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected”, and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet”.

Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.

Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt”, Zuckerberg said.

At the time, he said, executives were “super optimistic” about tools like Claude Code from AI start-up Anthropic.

Meta is projected to spend as much as US$145 billion (S$187.32 billion) on AI infrastructure in 2026, a significant portion of Big Tech’s more than US$700 billion outlay on the technology.

Zuckerberg said he expects that the social media giant will begin to experience more significant benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months.

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on July 2.

In the same town hall, Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth said a review of a recent data security incident with the company’s controversial mouse-tracking software indicated that no employee data was included in AI training.

In June, Meta paused the programme, which tracks employee mouse movements and digital activity for AI training, while investigating the exposure of sensitive data.

If the company turns the programme back on once the review is completed, it will be on an “opt-in” basis, he said.

“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 at the town hall on July 2.

When Meta first installed the programme on US employees’ computers in April, Bosworth told them there was no way to opt out. REUTERS