Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Project OT aimed to reduce team sizes by up to 60% as part of a strategy to transition the company towards becoming AI-native. However, plans for significant layoffs were ultimately abandoned before the anticipated wave in November.
Mark Zuckerberg spent the first half of 2026 quietly redesigning Meta around a single bet: that artificial intelligence could absorb the daily work of thousands of its employees. Reuters, which reviewed internal planning documents and spoke to more than 20 people familiar with the company, reported that executives ran scenario exercises examining what would happen if many teams across Meta shrank by as much as 60%. On the night of May 19, hours before the first wave landed, Zuckerberg pulled the plug on the second. Meta went ahead the next morning with a 10% cut, roughly 8,000 jobs, and then stopped. Product teams of 10 to 20 people would give way to pods of three to five. Middle management layers would disappear, leaving unit heads responsible for 30 to 50 people and pod leads running daily work with no formal authority.
Meta has since confirmed Project OT, describing it as a year-long effort focused on cost cutting, redesigning team structures and shifting staff into priority work such as producing training data for its AI models.
What remained would be small, “talent-dense” groups of humans overseeing virtual workers. Engineers, designers and researchers would share one generic title, “builder”. The plan had a code name, Project OT, short for Organization Transformation, and it was drawn up in January at the chief executive’s Hawaii compound during Meta’s annual leadership retreat. The restructuring was meant to arrive in two waves, one in May and another in November. Four months later, the company is doing something odder: asking engineers in its new Applied AI division whether they would like to be managers again. The blueprint was unusually specific. An early pilot under product management vice president Ime Archibong created five small pods that built prototypes in four-week sprints rather than six-month planning cycles. Meta also built an HR tool to identify irreplaceable talent, the kind of engineer Silicon Valley likes to call a 10X performer, and planned to spend part of its layoff savings on keeping them.
More than 1,000 employees signed a petition against it, flyers went up in offices, and internal posts filled with elephant images to mark the layoffs nobody would discuss. Meta’s half-year Pulse survey showed employee sentiment falling from 74% favourable to 55%. Code changes to internal systems jumped 220% year on year, yet changes that reached actual users rose only 36%. Major technical and security incidents climbed 40%, and time spent firefighting them rose 70%.
Staff revolted once tracking software began capturing keystrokes and mouse clicks on US laptops to teach AI agents how humans use computers. The technology was struggling too. In June, attackers exploited Meta’s AI customer support bot to reach high-profile Instagram accounts, including the dormant Obama White House page.