Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s agentic AI efforts aren’t progressing as fast as he had hoped

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told employees at an internal town hall meeting that the company’s work on artificial intelligence agents hasn’t progressed as quickly as he had hoped.

It’s a rare admission from the founder that not everything is going to plan as it tries to turn its multibillion-dollar investments into AI into something that provides genuine value to businesses and consumers alike.

Reuters reported that Zuckerberg (pictured) told employees that AI agent development “has not accelerated in the way we expected” over the last four months. He also admitted that a company organization that involved significant job cuts wasn’t as clean as it could have been, adding that its bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.”

It’s a very different message from the one Zuckerberg signaled to investors back in January, when he promised a slate of new AI models and products would be coming to the company’s platforms “over the coming months.” The founder singled out agentic shopping as one area of focus, with Meta leveraging the unique context it has of its user base, such as their social graphs, content histories, relationships and personal interests. But so far, shopping agents are nowhere to be found on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

The delays could be problematic, because Zuckerberg has bet an awful lot on AI agents helping to deliver a return on the billions of dollars it has thrown into AI infrastructure. In April, Meta increased its capital expenditure forecast to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from an earlier forecast of $115 billion to $135 billion.

But it’s not clear when the company will start to see any payoff. At the town hall, Zuckerberg insisted that the company should start seeing more substantial benefits from its spending within the next three to six months. That would mean toward the end of 2026, more than a year after Meta created its Superintelligence Labs unit and shifted more workers to focus on AI projects.

At the town hall, Zuckerberg also conceded that he had made some mistakes in that workforce readjustment, and added that he will “almost certainly make more.” According to Reuters, Meta has laid off about 10% of its employees this year and transferred more than 7,000 to work on AI initiatives.

Meta is betting on its ability to build reliable autonomous agents that can perform work on behalf of humans in areas such as commerce, advertising, software engineering and as consumer assistants. At the same time, it’s dramatically expanding its data center infrastructure to support these envisioned workloads.

The company unveiled an initiative called Meta Compute in January that aims to build tens of gigawatts of AI compute capacity over the next 10 years. Earlier this week, we learned more about the company’s plans when Axios reported that it’s also considering selling some of that capacity to other customers. That would give Meta a way to make money from its infrastructure in the event that its agentic plans are further delayed.

Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth was also at the town hall, speaking about the company’s controversial agent training initiative that launched in April. The program saw Meta forcibly install software on employees’ computers that would track mouse movements and keyboard inputs in order to create data that can be used to teach agents how to operate computers. According to Bosworth, a review of a recent data security incident involving that software found that no personal data from its employees has been used for AI training purposes.

The review followed a decision to halt the program last month, while the company investigated an incident which resulted in sensitive data being exposed. Bosworth said that if his team decides to restart the project, it will no longer be mandatory, but opt-in.

No doubt, Meta views the program as key to getting its AI agent plans back on track, but it’s not clear if enough employees would be willing to opt into it to make a difference, or if the company is even willing to risk further controversy. For now, Meta still has its core advertising business, which throws off enough cash to sustain its enormous spending for now, but there will come a point when the company’s investors will start to demand some results.

Photo: Bloomberg Originals/YouTube