Meta Planned to Replace 60% of Staff with AI Agents — It Backfired

At a January 2026 retreat in Hawaii, Zuckerberg announced Project OT, which aims to transform Meta into an AI agent-driven organization. By downsizing teams by 60%, most of their daily operations would be handled by agents managed by smaller workgroups. Layoffs were planned for November 2026.

Instead, the project backfired. Although the agents wrote +220% more code, they only created +36% more user value. There was also a 40% increase in technical issues & downtime, which took up 70% of employees’ extra time. “Our pace of progress on developing agents hasn’t been as fast as we hoped,” Zuckerberg conceded in July. He called off the next set of layoffs.

This is the first high-profile failure of a big company trying to completely rebuild itself as an agentic organization. It shows that agents are capable of generating activity, but not value. This process will take much longer than many predicted.