Meta planned for AI to take over thousands of people's daily work, then shelved its second layoff wave

Meta spent the first half of 2026 planning to hand much of its employees' daily work to AI agents, according to a Reuters special report built on internal documents, recordings and interviews with more than 20 people. Code-named Project OT, for Organization Transformation, and drawn up at Mark Zuckerberg's January leadership retreat, the plan would have shrunk product teams of 10 to 20 specialists into pods of three to five, merged engineers, designers and product managers into a single "builder" role, and removed layers of middle management; some scenarios modelled cutting team sizes by as much as 60%. Meta laid off 10% of its staff on May 20, but hours earlier Zuckerberg called off planning for a second wave in November. Internal figures showed why: code changes rose 220% year on year while features reaching users rose only 36%, major technical and security incidents rose 40% and time spent firefighting rose 70%. Employee sentiment fell from 74% favourable to 55%. Meta described the work as a scenario-planning exercise it never expected to carry out in full, and Zuckerberg has said he does not expect other company-wide layoffs this year.