Zuckerberg: Meta’s AI agent progress slower than expected

Mark Zuckerberg told a company meeting Thursday that Meta’s work on AI agents “hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected” over the past four months, and that the company’s bet on agent adoption “hasn’t come to fruition yet.” He added that leadership pushed into agent infrastructure in January because executives feared the company was not moving fast enough, and he expects the firm’s AI investments to start paying off within three to six months.

The remarks followed a company restructuring in May that reduced staff by about 10% and reassigned roughly 7,000 employees to AI-focused teams. Zuckerberg acknowledged the redeployments and staff cuts were not as clean as planned and that executives miscalculated the timing of their bets on agent technology.

Meta has continued to release agent features while work on underlying systems continues. On Thursday the company expanded Meta Business Agent globally across Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Meta says the Business Agent can handle customer inquiries, make product recommendations and close sales without human intervention. Zuckerberg has also been developing a personal AI agent to assist his decision-making as CEO.

Several technology and crypto firms have announced integrations to enable agents to transact. In May, Amazon Web Services added the x402 payments protocol to its Bedrock AgentCore to allow agents to transact in the USDC stablecoin. In April, a crypto wallet startup launched a Visa-backed virtual card intended to let AI agents make purchases in USDT on behalf of businesses.

Despite those integrations, on-chain activity tied to agent payment protocols remains small. Data show roughly $2 million in trading volume moved through the x402 protocol over the past 30 days.

Zuckerberg reiterated that he expects the company’s AI investments to begin producing returns within three to six months.