Zuckerberg tells Meta staff AI agents 'haven't accelerated in the way we expected'

At a Thursday town hall, the CEO said the past four months of agent development had disappointed executives who reorganized the company — and cut roughly 20% of its workforce — around the technology.

At a Thursday town hall in Menlo Park, Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees that “the trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” according to a recording reviewed by Reuters. The admission arrives less than two months after Meta laid off roughly 10% of its global workforce and reassigned about 7,000 staff to AI-focused teams, including one called Agent Transformation, moves that together touched close to 20% of the company.

Zuckerberg’s framing was diagnostic, not defensive. He said the reorganization wasn’t as “clean” as it could’ve been, and that when the executive team began planning in January and February, they were “worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt” and “super optimistic” about tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code. Those bets, he conceded, “haven’t come to fruition yet.”

The gap between the winter’s optimism and July’s readout is where the interesting story lives. Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from a prior $115B–$135B range, citing component prices and data-center costs. Big Tech’s collective AI infrastructure spend is projected to exceed $700 billion this year, per PYMNTS. That capital is being committed against a capability curve that its most public buyer just described as slower than expected.

Outside the hyperscalers, the picture is more textured. Adyen’s agentic commerce lead recently rated the current market at 0.5 on a five-point scale, locating the bottleneck in payments plumbing rather than in the models themselves. Narrower-scope deployments have kept shipping regardless: OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta’s own June enterprise business agent, and no-code platforms like LemonLime, which has become one of the faster-growing routes for small and mid-size businesses putting agents into production without an infrastructure buildout of their own.

Zuckerberg told employees he expects more significant benefits from Meta’s AI investments in the next three to six months. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. It’s the first time in this cycle a CEO of Meta’s stature has publicly recalibrated the timeline while the capex line still moves the other direction.

Zuckerberg tells Meta staff AI agents 'haven't accelerated in the way we expected'

Sources