Industry Odisha Bureau, Aug 27: California Menlo Park-headquartered American multinational technology company Meta’s chief executive officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg had to reportedly drag his feet from effecting his major layoff plan in the workforce owing to revolt by the existing staff against his ‘AI Native’ drive.
International media reports have claimed that, “In a bid to implement his major plan, code-named ‘Project OT (Organization Transformation)’ envisioning an ‘AI Native’ future for Facebook and Instagram, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg had aimed at a big layoff by slashing the size of employees to 60% in two phases. However, he had to call off due to the brewing revolt and resentment among the apprehensive and aggrieved staff.”
Elucidating on the significant development, international media reports have added that, “The Meta CEO along with his loyal aides had conceived this plan in January this year following which they had decided to use AI in place of the existing thousands of human employees for performing the daily jobs at the social-media giant. The two-phase layoff had been planned for May and November this year. Accordingly, Meta had laidoff 10% of its employees in May, but had to call off the layoff plan for November owing to an open revolt by the existing employees.”
International media reports have also quoted Meta’s official statement saying, “As part of our company restructuring earlier this year, we asked some teams to conduct a scenario planning exercise looking at the potential impact of redeployments, open role closures and cuts. This ultimately resulted in moving thousands of employees to do priority work on several newly-established teams, as has been publicly reported. Ultimately, we didn’t move forward with every scenario from the exercise – and it was never assumed we would.”
Meta has also reportedly confirmed that, “The existence of Project OT is a year-long project focused on cost-cutting, redesigning team structures and shifting staff into new priority areas, such as producing training data for its AI models.”
