Meta is shifting 7,000 employees into AI roles while pouring up to $135 billion into infrastructure, but workers warn the push is fueling anxiety, distrust and fears their own jobs could become obsoleteOmer Kabir, Calcalist| Related TopicsMeta’s sweeping layoffs reached Israel on Wednesday, as employees at the company’s local offices began receiving dismissal notices as part of a global cut of roughly 8,000 jobs, about 10% of its workforce.The move comes as the tech giant shifts more resources toward artificial intelligence, restructures product and engineering teams and tries to reduce costs amid soaring investment in AI infrastructure.1 View gallery (Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo/File Photo Tags)The layoffs began earlier in the day in Asia, with employees at Meta’s Singapore headquarters receiving notices at 4 a.m. local time. Workers in Europe, the United States and Israel were then expected to receive similar notices as the process rolled across time zones.Meta offices around the world were expected to be mostly empty Wednesday after the company asked employees to work from home. According to The New York Times, workers were seen earlier this week collecting snacks and laptop chargers from offices amid concern they could lose their jobs.The current round of cuts is expected to focus on engineering and product development teams. Bloomberg reported that Meta is expected to carry out another round of reductions later this year.At the same time, Meta is carrying out a major AI-focused reorganization. On Monday, the company said 7,000 employees would be moved into new AI-related roles across four new work groups.“The groups will make use of an AI-based design structure and will have fewer managers per employee than other parts of the company,” Meta’s chief people officer Janelle Gale wrote in a memo to employees. “The reorganization will raise our output and make the work more rewarding.”Meta plans to invest between $115 billion and $135 billion this year in AI infrastructure, part of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s push to close the gap with rivals. The company is under growing pressure from Google, which has more powerful AI models and is further along in integrating them into its ecosystem for consumers and businesses.Google also opened a new front against Meta this week at its annual developer conference, where it unveiled AI glasses expected to compete with a similar product from Zuckerberg’s company.But before Meta can fully compete with other tech giants, Zuckerberg must contend with morale inside his own company. According to Bloomberg, his demands that engineers increase their use of AI agents, along with a plan to monitor daily work and collect information from employee devices to train AI models, have sparked anxiety and frustration among workers.More than 1,000 employees have signed a petition demanding that Zuckerberg and company leadership refrain from collecting data from their devices. Others have written on social media about the impact of layoff fears on their productivity and morale.“AI is a freight train, but the future isn’t finalized. It is not too late to hit the brakes and consider how we, as a company, want to do this,” Meta engineer Mark Ward wrote in a post on an internal employee forum that received more than 2,000 likes from colleagues. “It’s never easy to speak up, but we weren’t hired to do easy.”Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth addressed some of the concerns in a meeting last week.“There are a tremendous number of employees who feel anxious about their future,” he said, according to The New York Times. “It is all bad. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat it.”After the layoffs are completed, Zuckerberg and Meta’s next major challenge will be to regain the trust of the employees who remain and enlist them in the company’s AI mission. That may prove difficult when success in that mission could ultimately make some of those same employees less essential.Comments