Mark Zuckerberg’s secret Meta plan could have cut some teams by 60% to make AI run the company
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Mark Zuckerberg’s secret Meta plan could have cut some teams by 60% to make AI run the company")
Meta’s secret Project OT planned team cuts of up to 60% as Mark Zuckerberg pushed to make company AI-native
Meta’s secret Project OT explored shrinking some teams by up to 60% as Mark Zuckerberg pushed to make the company AI-native. After an 8,000-job May cut, Meta cancelled its planned November layoff wave and is now offering some former managers a route back into management.
Mark Zuckerberg quietly spent much of 2026 trying to redesign Meta around artificial intelligence, including plans that considered cutting some teams by as much as 60%, according to internal planning documents and people familiar with the effort.
The project, known internally as Project OT, or Organization Transformation, was developed during Meta’s leadership retreat in Hawaii. The idea was radical: smaller groups of highly skilled employees would oversee AI-powered virtual workers and handle work that previously required much larger teams. Meta eventually carried out a 10% workforce reduction in May, affecting roughly 8,000 jobs, but Zuckerberg cancelled a planned second wave in November.
Zuckerberg’s AI-native blueprint
Project OT was not simply a layoff exercise.
The plan envisaged product teams of around 10 to 20 people being replaced by pods of three to five. Engineers, designers and researchers could also be grouped under the broader title of “builder”. Middle-management layers would be reduced, with unit heads overseeing larger groups while pod leads handled day-to-day work without formal management authority. An early pilot created five small teams that built prototypes in four-week cycles instead of following much longer planning processes. Meta also developed tools to identify highly valuable employees who would be worth retaining even as teams became smaller.
AI transformation creates its own problems
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The restructuring did not go smoothly. Employees objected after Meta began using software that captured keyboard and mouse activity on US laptops to help train AI agents to perform computer tasks. More than 1,000 employees signed a petition opposing the programme.
Internal employee sentiment also dropped sharply, while Meta's own data raised questions about whether smaller teams were actually delivering more. Code changes increased 220% year-on-year, but changes reaching users rose only 36%. Major technical and security incidents also increased, according to the reported internal data. The result was a growing gap between the promise of AI-powered productivity and the complexity of running a huge technology company.
Meta is now bringing managers back
The most striking twist has come inside Meta's new Applied AI division. Around 7,000 employees were moved into the group this year, including some managers who had been shifted into individual contributor roles. Now, some of those employees are being offered a voluntary route back into management. That move comes after Zuckerberg acknowledged that the reorganisation had been mistimed and that AI agents had not advanced as quickly as he expected. Meta ended the second quarter with 75,472 employees and has committed enormous resources to AI infrastructure. The lesson from Project OT may therefore be more complicated than simply “AI needs fewer workers”. Meta wanted AI to allow fewer humans to run more work. Instead, it is discovering that building an AI-native company may itself require a substantial human layer to manage, supervise and fix what AI cannot yet handle.
