Zuckerberg Is Building an AI Agent to Help Him

“Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone inside and outside his company to eventually have his or her own personal artificial-intelligence agent. He is starting with himself.

 

Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta Platforms, is building a CEO agent to help him do his job, a person familiar with the project said.

 

The agent, which is in development, is helping Zuckerberg get information faster -- for instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get, the person familiar with the project said.

 

Zuckerberg's agent project reflects a drive across the 78,000-person company to accelerate the pace of work, eliminate layers from its organizational structure and change the day-to-day jobs of its employees to remain competitive with AI-native startups with much smaller staffs. The company views AI adoption as critical to its success and is experimenting with how to integrate more of it into its business.

 

Zuckerberg, who has also been spending more time coding recently, previewed some of the efforts on the company's earnings call in January.

 

"We're investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done. We're elevating individual contributors and flattening teams," he said. "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."

 

Use of AI tools has spread quickly through the ranks at Meta -- in part because it is now a factor in employees' performance reviews.

 

Meta's internal message board is filled with posts from employees sharing new AI use cases they have found and new tools they have built using AI, people familiar with the matter said.

 

Some inside the company described the atmosphere as reminiscent of the company's early days, when its name was still Facebook and its unofficial internal motto was "move fast and break things." (Zuckerberg said while giving testimony during a recent trial that the company has moved away from that motto in favor of something more akin to "move fast with stable infrastructure.")

 

Employees have started using personal agent tools such as My Claw that have access to their chat logs and work files and can go talk to colleagues -- or their colleagues' own personal agents -- on their behalf, the people said.

 

Another AI tool called Second Brain that is somewhere between a chatbot and an agent is also gaining momentum internally, people familiar with the matter said.

 

Second Brain was built by a Meta employee on top of Claude and can index and query documents for projects, among other uses.

 

On the internal post announcing it to staff, the employee said it is "meant to be like an AI chief of staff."

 

There is even a group on the internal messaging board where employees' personal agents talk to each other, some of the people said.

 

(Separately, Meta acquired Moltbook, the social-media site for AI agents, and hired its founders in a deal this month.)

 

Meta also recently acquired Manus, a Singapore-based startup that makes personal agents that can execute tasks for its users, and is using the tool internally, some of the people said.

 

Meta recently established a new applied AI engineering organization that is tasked with using AI to help speed up development of the company's large language models.

 

Those teams will have an ultraflat structure of as many as 50 individual contributors reporting to one manager, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

 

"We're designing this org to be AI native from day one," Maher Saba, the Meta executive in charge of the new organization, said in an internal post announcing the teams, which report to the company's technology chief, Andrew Bosworth.

 

Employees across the company said they have been encouraged to attend AI tutorial meetings several times a week and frequent AI hackathons, and to create their own AI tools to speed up their work.

 

While one employee described the current era at Meta as fun and empowering, others have said the rapid change and intense focus on AI use has fed anxiety about potential layoffs.

 

Meta laid off a portion of its staff for the first time in 2022 after nearly doubling its head count to a peak of 87,314 during the Covid years.

 

At the time Meta found itself facing a slumping digital-ads market and a falling stock price, and it cut 11,000 roles.

 

Zuckerberg declared 2023 Meta's "year of efficiency" and said the company would cut 10,000 more jobs over the following months and reduce hiring rates.

 

By year's end, Meta's head count had shrunk to roughly 67,000.

 

In the subsequent years, however, the number of employees continued to climb. As of the last official tally, Meta's head count had reached 78,865.

 

At a conference earlier this month, Meta's chief financial officer, Susan Li, discussed the importance of updating Meta's workforce practices to reflect the competition in AI.

 

"Making sure that we don't -- for a company at the size and scale that we are -- that we don't work any less efficiently than companies that are AI native from the start, that's something that I think about a lot," she said.” [1]

 

1. Zuckerberg Is Building an AI Agent to Help Him. Bobrowsky, Meghan.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 24 Mar 2026: B1.