Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that Meta’s “agentic development” has not paid off yet after the company made sweeping layoffs earlier this year, according to reports.
The social media giant – which is projected to spend up to $145B on artificial intelligence infrastructure this year – had let around 10% of its global workforce go in May and reassigned approximately 7,000 employees to AI-focused teams as part of a large-scale reorganization.
The changes were part of a wider effort to fund investments in AI infrastructure and position the company to benefit from efficiency gains from AI-assisted work. Zuckerberg said that the restructuring was not as “clean” as it could have been and executives had miscalculated the timing, according to Reuters.
Zuckerberg’s apparent admission is something of a reality check for Salesforce’s aggressive push into the world of AI agents. CEO Marc Benioff has staked Salesforce’s entire growth story on Agentforce, and has said that AI is handling as much as half of the work at Salesforce now. So, should the CRM company be worried?
Meta’s AI Bet
According to a recording heard by Reuters, Zuckerberg said that, in retrospect, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected”, and that Meta’s bets on the new structure have not “come to fruition yet”.
The CEO reportedly added that conversations he had with “our top people” when they started the restructuring planning early this year “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt”. He added that, at the time, execs had been “super optimistic” about tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Zuckerberg said that he expects that Meta will start to experience more significant benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months, reports say.
SF Ben has contacted Meta for comment.
One Billion Agents
Salesforce’s entire growth story appears to rest on Agentforce – both externally and internally. It has been at the forefront of seemingly every Salesforce announcement, event, and product since it was announced at Dreamforce ‘24. At that very conference, Benioff announced a goal to reach one billion customer-created agents by the end of 2025.
If the reported comments from Zuckerberg are right, and agentic development has not “accelerated” in the way executives had expected, it might be a point against Salesforce’s vision of the ‘digital labor’ revolution taking the world by storm.
In an interview with Bloomberg last year, Benioff said that AI is doing “30 to 50% of the work at Salesforce now, and I think that will continue”.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) wrote in January 2025 that AI was reshaping business models, with half of employers globally planning to “reorient their business to target new opportunities resulting” from it.
The WEF said that the most common workforce response to these changes is expected to be upskilling workers, with 77% of employers planning to do so, but 41% plan to reduce their workforce as AI automates certain tasks.
In September 2025, Benioff revealed that Salesforce used AI agents to replace around 4,000 customer support division employees.
Speaking on the Logan Bartlett show, Benioff said that the previous few months had been the most exciting in his Salesforce career, and that agentic AI was performing at a level that enabled the company to lower headcount.
“We’re customer zero for our new agentic service and support product, so we have now done about a million and a half conversations with customers, and at the same time, that’s the agentic layer speaking to the customer,” Benioff said.
“A million and a half conversations also happened through our support agents during that same period, and the CSAT scores were about the same. I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support – I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads.”
Final Thoughts
Meta and Salesforce are two distinct entities, and just because one is having apparent setbacks with its agentic program, that doesn’t mean the other necessarily is.
Tech layoffs have been going on for a while, and AI is often blamed for this, but another theory – that companies are readjusting headcount after over-hiring during the Covid boom –also seems to have some merit.
We will have to see if Zuckerberg’s apparent comments, that he expects Meta will see benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months, are proven prophetic, or just simple hype.
