Meta wants some of its employees to be managers again.
The social media giant has been asking some individual contributors in its Applied AI (AAI) division to transition back into management roles as part of a recent reshuffle, four people with knowledge of the matter told Business Insider. This program is opt-in, a person familiar said.
AAI is a newly-launched Meta division focused on training AI models. Meta launched the group this year and reassigned roughly 7,000 employees to it. Some of those people were previously managers and given individual contributor roles within AAI.
Meta declined to comment.
The move marks a partial reversal for Meta, which has spent much of the past year cutting middle management and promoting smaller, flatter teams as more efficient. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has praised lean startup-style organizations, particularly as AI takes on more work.
Meta eliminated about 10% of its workforce this year through mass layoffs intended to "run the company more efficiently" and offset its huge AI investments. The layoffs heavily targeted managers, a Business Insider analysis of public layoff notices found.
This isn't the first time Meta has reversed course on some of its internal initiatives. The company allowed some employees reassigned to AAI to leave the organization, after criticism from some employees that they had been "drafted" into the unit.
Not all tech companies have fully embraced the manager-lite, small teams model. Uber, for example, announced it was cutting half of its "micro-teams" as part of recent layoffs.
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