Meta’s Project OT stumbles as AI workforce overhaul meets employee resistance and technical limits

Mark Zuckerberg wanted to rebuild Meta from the inside out, replacing large swaths of human workers with AI agents and creating what he called an “AI native” organization. Project OT, hatched during a leadership retreat in Hawaii in January 2026, envisioned workforce reductions of up to 60% across two phases in May and November. Instead, Meta ended up cutting roughly 10% of its workforce and publicly admitting that AI technology wasn’t ready for the role it had been cast in. The plan versus what actually happened The concept behind Project OT was ambitious: AI agents would take over daily tasks previously handled by humans, with smaller “talent-dense” teams overseeing the bots. Meta executed a 10% workforce reduction around May 20, 2026. A second, larger wave was scheduled for November. That wave never came. Strong employee resistance halted the November layoffs at the last moment. The company pivoted to a far more modest reduction the following day. Around 6,500 employees were transferred into a newly created Applied AI unit, reoriented toward AI-focused roles rather than being shown the door. The numbers told a complicated story about what AI agents were actually delivering. Code...