Mark Zuckerberg Says AI Now Lets One Person Do the Work of Entire Team

In his talk to analysts this week, Mark Zuckerberg did not refer specifically to layoffs. But what he spoke was such that it made people listen attentively. In the recent earnings call, the Facebook and Instagram chief indicated that artificial intelligence can now enable a single individual to perform the job that required an entire team to accomplish previously. Within Meta, new AI software is enabling engineers to work quicker, acquire larger projects, and depend on fewer personnel to accomplish them.

Zuckerberg commented that he is beginning to see projects that once took long armies to achieve being achieved by one very talented individual. In his case, he tries to attract the attention of people capable of applying these tools to their advantage. “I would like to ensure that a good number of these incredibly gifted individuals would decide on the place that they would make the biggest contribution and that place is the Meta.

Meta spends heavily to be confident about AI. The company estimated that it will increase its AI budget by approximately 70 per cent in 2021, and already reported a significant increase in the output-per-engineer ratio in 2025. Much of this was due to agentic coding where AI is proactive in assisting engineers in writing and maintaining code and not merely providing suggestions.

The concept of the small teams itself inevitably brings up the question of employment, particularly, following decades of layoffs throughout the technology sector. The head of Meta attempted to allay those fears. Chief financial officer Susan Li said the company continues to be adding people in key areas, although the teams are becoming lean.

Li reports that by the end of the December quarter, Meta had 6 per cent more employees than it had a year prior due to staff recruitment in its various divisions such as monetisation, infrastructure, regulation, compliance, and its Superintelligence Labs. She further observed that the except of skilled workers is also high and Meta is still ready to pay to attract the correct talent.

The thing that Meta is doing is not unique, however. Layers of management have been trimmed small in many large companies without much noise to create friction internally. This was pushed by Zuckerberg himself in 2023, who informed employees that flatter organisations move faster. At the end of last year, the Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai, announced that the corporation had downsized vice president and managerial positions by 10 per cent.

The same line of thought is proliferating beyond big tech. Fintech companies such as Block, and retailers such as Walmart and Wayfair have been returning managers to practical positions. Other people have gone even further. Only this week Amazon announced that it will lay off 16,000 corporate employees which is its second large round of layoffs in four months.

This trend is not new to start ups. In a statement from last year, the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, stated that it would not take long before AI would enable small teams or single founders to create a huge business. He even jested that tech leaders had bet amongst themselves on who would be the first person company to have a valuation of a billion dollars.

The drive to AI-powered productivity is limitless at Meta. The company acknowledged that demand of AI tools within the organisation has increased at greater rates than its availability to computing power. Nevertheless, Zuckerberg is optimistic that the working model of people is going to change significantly.

In 2026, he believes that AI will begin altering how we work in a drastic way.

Is a future announcement of layoffs by Meta?

So far, the company has not provided any of such warnings. However, what Zuckerberg says is that there may only be a smaller number of people who are required in the future to achieve the same outcomes, and the ones who are left will be expected to assume a higher degree of responsibility. In the technology sector, continuous layoffs already indicate that organizations are reducing their expenses to release finances to invest in AI. Companies such as Google have publicly indicated that certain positions in the lower level can be eliminated as AI replaces work in routine. Google and Microsoft have also disclosed that AI already generates up to 30 percent of its code, which provides a vivid picture of the pace at which jobs at the workplace are evolving.