Meta once planned for AI Agents to replace employees under the codename Project OT, with two planned phases, but eventually had to abandon the plan due to failure.
Reuters revealed that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had planned under the codename Project OT, short for Organization Transformation, to have AI Agents replace thousands of employees. However, the plan failed amid employee pushback and technical problems with Meta’s own AI tools, leading to the cancellation of the second wave of layoffs.
According to reports, the plan originated in January 2026 during Meta CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s annual executive retreat in Hawaii. He envisioned the company becoming AI native, with AI handling most daily tasks performed by thousands of employees, overseen by a small supervisory team."Virtual employees"that are AI-based.
The layoff plan was divided into two waves: the first in May and the second in November, followed by closing open positions and pushing out employees deemed underperforming. The internal plan aimed to reduce some teams by as much as 60% through layoffs, hiring freezes, and performance-based exits.
Meta confirmed to Reuters that Project OT was real, describing it as a year-long effort to cut costs, redesign team structures, reassign employees to higher-priority roles, and generate data to train AI models.
At the same time, Meta emphasized that the 60% reduction applied only to certain situations within some teams, never as a company-wide plan to cut workforce by that amount. The statement noted that Meta did not proceed with all scenarios it evaluated and never assumed it would do so.
One reason the plan faltered was strong employee resistance, especially over software installed on U.S. employees’ computers to track keystrokes and mouse movements. This data was used to train AI agents to use computers, raising concerns about training a system intended to replace themselves. This opposition grew until late May 2026.MarkZuckerberg convened a meeting with senior executives and ordered the suspension of the second restructuring wave planned for November, before the company proceeded with a 10% layoff—about 8,000 employees—later on.
Afterwards, Zuckerberg stated he did not expect further company-wide layoffs that year and stressed the need to increase employee job security. Subsequently, the company halted mouse movement tracking and slowed AI agent development beyond initial expectations.