Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says AI is transforming what a single employee can accomplish at the company, signaling it’s adopting a new hiring strategy.
On an earnings call with analysts Thursday, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said the company is investing in more AI-native tools to elevate individual contributors and flatten teams. The effort is being somewhat constrained, however, by a lack of compute resources.
“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” he said. “I want to make sure that as many of these very talented people as possible choose Meta as the place that they can make the greatest impact.”
The Facebook and Instagram parent, which reported fourth-quarter revenue and earnings that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, said it plans to boost AI spending by roughly 70% this year. Meta also said it already saw a significant increase in output per engineer last year, with the majority of that growth coming from the adoption of agentic coding.
Though teams are on track to become smaller, finance chief Susan Li said on the earnings call that the company is still hungry for top talent. “It remains a very competitive hiring market, but we’d like to invest aggressively where we can,” she said.
Li also noted that Meta closed out the December-ended quarter with 6% more employees than it had a year earlier, driven by hiring in areas such as monetization, infrastructure, Meta Superintelligence Labs, regulation, and compliance.
Meta isn’t alone in focusing on tiny teams. The strategy has become popular in the startup world, where founders have long prioritized scrappiness. It’s a trend that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted would take hold back in February 2024.
“We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon,” he said at the time. “In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen.”
Meanwhile, large companies have been thinning their middle manager ranks in recent years to boost efficiency by reducing bureaucracy, including Amazon and Intel. Meta’s Zuckerberg wrote a memo in 2023 entitled “Flatter is faster,” and in late 2024, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff that the company cut vice president and manager roles by 10% as part of an efficiency push.
The trend isn’t limited to tech companies. Retailers such as Walmart and Wayfair, and fintech firms like Block, have been moving managers into non-management roles. Some companies have also been conducting multiple rounds of mass layoffs. On Wednesday, Amazon said it would cut 16,000 corporate roles, the company’s second round of layoffs in four months.
On Meta’s earnings call, the company acknowledged that its goal of being able to lean on a smaller number of highly AI-savvy employees is challenged by a shortage of compute resources, as demand across the company has increased faster than its supply. Still, Zuckerberg expressed confidence in his outlook for greater efficiencies.
“I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” he said. “As we navigate this, our North Star is building the best place for individuals to make a massive impact.”
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