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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s development of AI agents has progressed more slowly than expected despite a major restructuring and a sharp increase in infrastructure spending.
Speaking during an internal town hall on Thursday, Zuckerberg said development over the previous four months had not “accelerated in the way we expected,” according to a recording reviewed by Reuters.
He also acknowledged that Meta’s recent reorganization was not as clean as it could have been and that the company’s bets on the new structure had yet to deliver expected results.
The restructuring included cuts affecting 10% of Meta’s global workforce and the transfer of another 7,000 employees into initiatives focused on AI workflows. The layoffs and transfers together affected about 20% of the company’s workforce.
Zuckerberg said he expects Meta to begin seeing more significant benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months. A company spokesperson declined to comment on the remarks.
Meta expects capital expenditures of between $125 billion and $145 billion in 2026, up from its previous range of $115 billion to $135 billion. The company attributed the increase to higher component prices and additional data center costs needed to support future capacity.
The spending makes Meta one of the largest contributors to the more than $700 billion that major technology companies are projected to invest in AI infrastructure this year.
Meta has been reorganizing its workforce and product development around AI agents that can perform tasks for employees, businesses and users across its applications.
The company launched an enterprise focused AI agent in June that is designed to help businesses automate daily operations across Meta’s platforms.
During the same town hall, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth addressed Meta’s employee monitoring program, which tracks mouse movements, clicks and other digital activity to produce AI training data.
Bosworth said an internal review found that no employee data from a recent security incident had been included in AI training. He added that any future restart of the program would require employees to opt in.
Meta paused the program in June after sensitive employee information was found to be accessible across the company. The exposed material included internal prompts, private conversations, performance information and other sensitive data, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.
The program was initially introduced on computers used by employees in the United States without an option to decline participation.
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