Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot to the metaverse during Covid seemed shocking, if not a bit bold at the time. After all, the CEO of Facebook invested tens of billions of dollars to pivot one of the world’s largest and most valuable companies into a purely speculative venture.
But now that metaverse hype has been replaced by the promise of agentic AI, Zuckerberg seems to be pivoting the company hard in that direction, reportedly relying on his own personal artificial intelligence agent to help him run the $1.5 trillion social media company.
Yup, according to a Wall Street Journal report, Zuckerberg is building an AI agent to help him do his job by removing layers of people and red tape from his day-to-day workflow. The agent, which is still in development, is part of Meta’s new push to integrate AI throughout its workforce, starting at the top.
“We’re investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done. We’re elevating individual contributors and flattening teams,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s last earnings call in January.
“If we do this, then I think that we’re going to get a lot more done, and I think it’ll be a lot more fun.”
Meta certainly seems enthusiastic about its new AI push.
Meta employees have started using personal agent tools such as MyClaw, which, according to the WSJ report, has “access to their chat logs and work files and can go talk to colleagues — or their colleagues’ own personal agents — on their behalf.”
Related: Meta is shutting down its VR metaverse
They are also using Second Brain, a Meta-employee-built AI tool that operates on top of Claude and can index and query documents. According to an internal memo announcing the new tool to staff, employees said the tool is “meant to be like an AI chief of staff.”
There are internal message boards where AI agents communicate with each other.
Employees say they’ve been encouraged to attend AI tutorial meetings several times a week and create their own AI tools to help speed up their work.
But it has to be hard to be encouraged to use these tools, since they will eventually, almost inevitably, be used to replace the people who use them.
Zuckerberg’s own AI agent seems to have one mission: reduce the human redundancies that are keeping Mark from being the best CEO he can be.
His agent, according to the Journal, is currently helping Zuckerberg get information faster by “retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get.”
How will those layers of people react now that they no longer serve that important function for the CEO?
