Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Thursday that the company's push to build autonomous AI agents — the central justification for 8,000 layoffs, 7,000 workforce transfers, and up to $145 billion in capital spending this year — has not progressed as quickly as he and his leadership team anticipated. The admission, made at an internal town hall on July 2 and confirmed through a recording obtained by Reuters, lands against an industry backdrop that validates rather than isolates his candor: only 11 percent of enterprises that have adopted agentic AI tools are running them in production, according to research aggregating Gartner, McKinsey, and Digital Applied data, and analysts project that more than 40 percent of all agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027.
For investors, the admission arrived at the worst possible moment. Meta shares dropped nearly 5 percent on Thursday, almost entirely reversing a 9 percent gain from the prior day when reports emerged that the company is developing a cloud computing business, codenamed "Meta Compute," to sell surplus AI capacity externally. A spokesperson declined to comment.
