Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees at an internal town hall on Thursday, July 3, 2026, that the company’s AI agent development had not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected.
Zuckerberg also acknowledged that the company’s recent layoffs had not been as “clean” as they should have been. Earlier this year, Meta cut approximately 8,000 employees — roughly 10 percent of its corporate workforce — and reassigned another 7,000 to AI-focused groups, including one called Agent Transformation. Zuckerberg said those cuts were made because leadership “were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt” to shifts in the tech industry.
At the same meeting, Zuckerberg reportedly said the anticipated benefits of Meta’s new AI-focused structure hadn’t “come to fruition yet,” though he expressed belief that the company would begin seeing returns on its AI investments within the next three to six months.
The admission comes as Meta is expected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, according to Reuters. Separate investigative reports have described conditions inside Meta’s months-old AI unit as difficult, with some assigned engineers characterizing it negatively.
The remarks suggest that even large-scale workforce restructuring and significant capital investment have not guaranteed the rapid AI progress Meta’s leadership had anticipated. Whether the company’s projected three-to-six-month timeline for improvement proves accurate remains to be seen. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Source: TechCrunch