Meta, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is continuing to shrink its workforce, like many of its peers in the tech industry. After laying off hundreds of employees earlier this week, a leaked document revealed the tech giant’s bizarre plan for several of its remaining staff as it shifts in a new direction.

Earlier this week, Meta laid off several hundred employees across multiple departments, including global operations, sales, recruiting, Reality Labs and even Facebook, according to a CNBC report.

Some employees affected by the change were offered new roles at the company, with some requiring relocation.

“Teams across Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they’re in the best position to achieve their goals,” said a Meta spokesperson in a statement to CNBC. “Where possible, we are finding other opportunities for employees whose positions may be impacted.”

The job cuts follow Meta's January layoffs of 1,000 employees in its Reality Labs division. The layoffs occurred after the department, which produces Meta’s virtual reality headsets, augmented reality smart glasses and metaverse vision, incurred $73 billion in losses since 2021 amid low consumer demand.

Last year, Meta also cut roughly 5% of its workforce, targeting low-performing employees. The layoffs come as the company has been ramping up its investment in artificial intelligence.

During an earnings call in January, Meta said it plans to spend $135 billion on AI to support initiatives across its Superintelligence Labs and core business.

A Reuters report later revealed that the company is allegedly considering laying off at least 20% of its workforce as it looks to offset mounting AI costs.

As Meta continues to conduct layoffs amid its big AI bet, it is taking an unusual approach to reorganizing teams to prepare them for the company’s new reality.

In a leaked memo, Meta stated that it plans to rebrand some of its employees as "AI builders," organizing them into AI-native "pods," according to a recent report from Business Insider.

Meta is piloting this change within its Reality Labs division, impacting a team of 1,000 employees where it plans to overhaul titles, roles and team structures.

The team within the division focuses on building developer tools, and each employee will hold one of these titles: AI builder, AI pod lead or AI org lead.

Related: Meta makes drastic workforce decision after $73 billion in losses

Each pod has a small group of AI builders that work across different specialties. Insider reports that this could include engineers tackling design work.

Pod leads oversee the day-to-day tasks these groups handle. Org leads oversee pod leads, and they organize performance reviews and promotions, which will be supported by "AI systems."

Meta began piloting this new structure within its Reality Labs division last month. The team’s size will not be impacted by the change, according to the memo.

"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," reads the memo. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."

Meta’s plan to restructure teams also comes during a time when it has set goals for how much employees should use AI tools to handle coding and other tasks.

In another internal document, Meta states that it expects 65% of its engineers to write more than 75% of their committed code using AI by the first half of this year, according to a separate Insider report.

Also, Meta's Scalable Machine Learning organization, which develops AI models and infrastructure, had a goal this February to achieve 50% to 80% of code assisted by AI.

In the fourth quarter of 2025, for central products, Meta expected 55% of its software engineers' code changes to be AI-assisted and 80% of mid to senior-level engineers to adopt AI tools.

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These goals don’t come as a surprise, as Meta started tying employee performance to their AI usage last year.

Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik said in a note on March 16, which was unveiled by Insider, that Meta’s recent job cuts and heavy AI deployment across its workforce could signal it is winning the AI race in the tech industry.

"Meta has already demonstrated the compelling returns they're seeing from deploying AI to core workloads," wrote Shmulik. "But if the company can now re-design their operations from the ground up to be AI-forward, their potential cost and performance advantage could be insurmountable."

Meta isn’t the only tech company betting big on AI and conducting layoffs. In January, Amazon laid off 16,000 employees as it leans more towards automation and AI.

Dell also reduced its headcount by about 10% in fiscal year 2026 as it aggressively expands its AI server business.

So far this year, 71 tech companies have conducted layoffs, impacting 40,482 employees, according to recent data from Layoffs.fyi.

A recent survey from Resume.org found that over half of U.S. companies plan to conduct layoffs this year, with AI being cited as the main cause of these job cuts, even if it's not the reason.

Roughly 55% of U.S. companies plan layoffs in 2026, while 92% plan to hire.

Nearly half (48%) anticipate job cuts as early as the first quarter of this year.

AI leads the reasons for layoffs, cited by 44% of companies, followed by reorganization (42%) and budget pressures (39%).

Also, 6 in 10 companies acknowledge they frame layoffs or hiring slowdowns around AI to make the decisions more acceptable, often hiding financial struggles.

Only 9% said AI has fully replaced certain roles, while 45% said it has partially reduced hiring needs, and 45% report that AI has had little to no impact on staffing levels. Source: Resume.org

Kara Dennison, head of career advising at Resume.org, said in the survey release that companies are using AI as an explanation for job cuts because it sounds “strategic, forward-looking, and inevitable.”

“Saying roles are being affected by AI signals innovation and modernization, while acknowledging financial strain can raise concerns among investors, employees, and customers,” said Dennison.

However, this narrative can have unintended consequences as it doesn’t always resonate with employees.

“Employees are far more perceptive than companies give them credit for,” she added. “When AI is used as a blanket explanation, but workloads do not meaningfully change, trust erodes quickly. People begin to question the transparency of leadership, its long-term stability, and whether future decisions will be communicated honestly. Over time, companies may find they have protected their narrative externally while damaging morale and retention internally.”

Related: Home Depot cuts back key employee benefit amid customer struggles

This story was originally published by TheStreet on Mar 28, 2026, where it first appeared in the Technology section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.