Is Mark Zuckerberg Using AI to Replace Himself as CEO? New Agent Paints Grim Picture for Workers as Job Cuts Loom.

As the battle between AI as a productivity tool and AI as a job killer intensifies, Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have just hammered another nail into the employee coffin. 

He’s building an AI agent to help himself run the company.

The so-called “CEO agent” is already assisting Zuckerberg in streamlining communications, according to The Wall Street Journal. The system allows him to “retrieve answers that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get,” a person familiar with the project told the newspaper.

Translation: If the CEO doesn’t need those layers of people anymore, neither does anyone else.

And Meta isn’t being subtle about where this is headed. 

The company is eyeing layoffs that could affect 20% or more of its workforce, Reuters reported earlier this month, citing three sources familiar with the matter. That would be the biggest restructuring since Meta cut 11,000 workers in November 2022 and another 10,000 in early 2023.

As of Dec. 31, Meta employed nearly 79,000 people. A 20% cut would eliminate roughly 16,000 jobs.

Flattening Teams, Eliminating Managers

Zuckerberg made his strategy clear on a January earnings call. “We’re investing in AI native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done,” he said. “We’re elevating individual contributors and flattening teams. If we do this, we’re going to get a lot more done.”

Put simply, Meta is restructuring around the premise that AI can replace traditional management layers. Teams in the company’s new AI-native groups are extremely flat, with some reporting structures including up to 50 individual contributors per manager.

Maher Saba, the Meta executive leading the new applied AI organization, said in an internal post: “We’re designing this org to be AI native from day one.”

Internally, AI adoption is no longer optional. Employee use of these AI tools is now factored into performance reviews.

The Metaverse, Act II?

It’s possible that this agentic strategy goes the way of the Metaverse and flops completely. Meta pivoted away from its $80 billion virtual reality project after years of losses and virtually no user adoption. Now Zuckerberg is betting the company’s future on AI agents that could eliminate the need for human workers entirely.

And Meta isn’t alone. Amazon (AMZN) cut around 16,000 jobs in January as part of a 30,000-person reduction. Block (XYZ), the fintech company formerly known as Square, cut nearly half its staff (more than 4,000 people), with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly citing AI.

“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey said in a post on X.

Being replaced by AI seems more likely at Meta than ever before.

Building an Army of Personal AIs

Zuckerberg’s approach is expanding rapidly across Meta. Employees are using MyClaw, an AI agent with access to their chat logs and work files that can communicate with other staff or their personal agents.

Another tool called Second Brain, developed by a Meta employee through Claude, is gaining momentum internally. The tool’s creator describes it as “meant to be like an AI chief of staff” that can index and query documents for projects.

Meta has also acquired startups to bolster its AI work, including Moltbook (a social network built for AI agents) and Manus (which creates AI agents capable of independently executing complex tasks).

The company even set up an applied AI engineering organization to partner with its Superintelligence Lab and build “the data engine that helps our models get better, faster.”

CFO Susan Li framed the AI push as existential. “Making sure that we don’t work any less efficiently than companies that are AI native from the start, that’s something that I think about a lot,” she said.

For Meta’s 79,000 employees, the writing is on the wall. When your CEO is building an AI version of himself and telling investors that flattening teams will help the company “get a lot more done,” it doesn’t take an artificial intelligence agent to predict what comes next.