What Meta is asking
Meta is asking some individual contributors in its Applied AI division whether they would move back into management, Business Insider reported, citing four people with knowledge of the matter. The move is voluntary, and some of the people involved were managers before they were moved into individual contributor roles inside the unit, according to Fortune’s account of the report.
It is a partial reversal. Meta has spent much of the past year removing layers of management, and Applied AI was built on the premise that far fewer managers could oversee far larger teams.
A division designed to be flat
Applied AI is an engineering organisation Meta created this year to connect its AI research with product work, training models and speeding up their deployment. When the unit was set up in March, an internal memo described teams with one manager for every 50 individual contributors, LeadDev reported at the time, citing The Wall Street Journal. It is led by Maher Saba, who reports to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth.
Meta reassigned roughly 7,000 employees into the division earlier this year, Fortune said. Some objected to being moved, and Meta later allowed some of them to leave the unit, RTTNews reported.
The cuts that came first
In May, Meta cut about 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 people, and dropped plans to fill 6,000 open positions. Those layoffs fell disproportionately on managers, according to Fortune.
Meta ended the second quarter with 75,472 employees, down 3% from the previous quarter. Revenue for the quarter rose 28% to $60.8bn, while total expenses climbed 55% to $42bn.
What Reuters found
The management request comes just over two weeks after a Reuters investigation into how Meta’s broader plan to reorganise around AI ran into trouble. According to the report by Katie Paul and Jeff Horwitz, the effort was code-named Project OT, short for Organization Transformation, and took shape at a leadership retreat in January. In scenario planning, executives explored shrinking many teams by as much as 60%.
Reuters reported that internal figures showed code changes up 220% year on year, while new or upgraded features reaching users rose only 36%. Major technical and security incidents climbed 40% from the prior year, and the time staff spent responding to them rose 70%. Favourable responses in Meta’s internal Pulse survey fell from 74% to 55%.
The investigation also said Zuckerberg halted planning for a second restructuring wave, which had been pencilled in for November, shortly before the May layoffs were announced. At an internal town hall in early July, according to Reuters, he said agent technology had not accelerated as quickly as he had expected, and that he anticipated improvements within three to six months.
Meta’s response
Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. None of the reports we reviewed carried a statement from the company about the management request.
What to watch
The reports so far describe a request confined to Applied AI, so the first question is how far it spreads. The second is how many people accept, and whether the one-to-50 ratio the division was designed around survives the change. The third has a date attached: the three-to-six-month window Zuckerberg gave staff in July for agents to improve closes between October and January, and it will show whether Meta returns to the idea of smaller teams run with AI or keeps rebuilding its management layer.
