Meta's Rapid AI Reorganization: A Tale of Discontent and Adaptation
Meta, the tech giant once known for its generous perks and flexibility, is undergoing a dramatic transformation as it races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence. The company is mandating that over 7,000 workers move to new teams, and it's radically changing some employees' jobs. This rapid-fire reorganization is stirring up discontent within Meta, as workers feel disillusioned and disempowered.
The company is taking away some managers' direct reports and shifting them into roles where they're expected to produce work more than oversee others. This shift is a trend throughout Silicon Valley as companies embrace AI tools and try to flatten their management structures. Meta is also laying off approximately 10% of its workforce, despite record earnings during the first three months of 2026.
One of the most controversial aspects of Meta's AI plans is its extensive surveillance of employees. The company has begun rolling out a monitoring tool called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), which tracks workers' mouse movements, keystrokes, and every time they open and close their laptop and anything they copy and paste. This data is fed into their AI model as training data, which has raised concerns among employees.
Meta employees have been outspoken in the past, including an employee-organized virtual walkout in 2020 over Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's handling of Donald Trump's posts encouraging violence against Black protesters. However, since 2022 when layoffs began, workers have mostly been quiet. But now, a group of employees is attempting to organize their colleagues to push back against Meta's AI plans, posting flyers across at least five US Meta offices and signing a petition demanding Meta to stop collecting employee data to feed to their AI models.
The company's internal culture has shifted since its first-ever layoffs in 2022. Small acts foreshadowed what was to come: rolling layoffs with months of uncertainty before confirmation, MCI, and drafting. This has made Meta workers feel disillusioned and disempowered. The company's extreme culture of fear and quashing of employee dissent have also contributed to the current mood.
Meta is playing catch-up in the AI race, with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic's consumer AI products already in the lead. In January, Zuckerberg said in an earnings call that the company will spend up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure this year to train leading models and deliver personal super intelligence to billions of people and businesses around the world. Despite these ambitions, the company's layoffs and internal reorganizations are impacting employee morale, and the future of Meta's AI plans remains uncertain.
