Internal documents and interviews reportedly reveal that Meta had drawn up a radical restructuring plan called Project OT, short for Organisation Transformation. The idea was to make the company “AI native” by shifting much of the daily work from human employees to artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
To achieve this, Meta explored cutting team sizes by as much as 60 per cent in two waves — one in May and another in November.
The plan would have meant thousands of layoffs, redeployments into new units, and closure of open positions. Some employees would have been moved to priority areas such as producing training data for AI models, while others would have lost their jobs. The scale of the restructuring was projected to be as large or larger than Meta’s 25 per cent workforce reduction three years earlier.
But just hours before the first wave in May, CEO Mark Zuckerberg halted planning for the second round. Meta still laid off about 10 per cent of its workforce, but the deeper cuts were shelved.
Employee resistance played a major role. Many staff members believed the AI transformation was designed to replace them, and internal data showed that autonomous AI agents were not delivering the productivity gains expected. Investors also questioned the returns on Meta’s massive AI spending.
The episode highlights how quickly the company’s ambitious plan unravelled. Meta confirmed that Project OT was a year-long exercise in cost cutting and team redesign, but said it never intended to eliminate 60 per cent of its workforce. While thousands were redeployed to new teams, the larger restructuring was reportedly abandoned before final numbers were decided.
Meta’s future workforce strategy remains unclear, but the incident shows the risks of trying to replace large numbers of employees with AI too quickly.
