Breaking: Meta to cut around 350 Irish jobs as part of AI push

Meta employs approximately 1,800 people in Ireland.

Meta's Irish workers have been informed that their roles have been cut as the tech giant moves to cut 8,000 jobs across the world.

The company began notifying workers around the world on Wednesday morning, part of a previously announced restructuring aimed at reducing costs while the company invests heavily in artificial intelligence.

It is understood that around 350 Irish jobs are to be cut. Meta employs approximately 1,800 workers in Ireland, and the impacted staff have been notified that their roles are being cut.

The tech giant has also informed the Department of Enterprise of the planned layoffs as they are required to under Irish law.

Staff globally were encouraged to work from home while the company cut roughly 8,000 roles globally. This latest round of cuts is expected to hit Meta’s engineering and product teams in particular, and additional layoffs could come later in the year, said people familiar with the company’s plans, who asked not to be named as the information is not public.

AI reaching 'dangerous stage'

Speaking on the announcement, the Financial Services Union (FSU), which representatives members of Meta staff, said the sector was reaching a "dangerous stage" where regulation is trailing implementation.

"Decisions been taken by employers to utilise AI across their business is happening without adequate training for staff and without proper oversight."

"Full and transparent stakeholder involvement is required from unions to employers and regulators to legislators to manage the change that AI will make to the workplace and to jobs. Without that collaboration we will continue to see announcements of job losses like we have seen today," the FSU said.

On Monday, Meta informed staff that some 7,000 workers have also been reassigned to newly formed teams that are focused on AI initiatives, including products and agents. The company, which has committed well in excess of $100bn (€85.2bn) to AI capital expenditures this year, had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March, ahead of the reassignments and layoffs.

“We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership,” Meta’s Head of People Janelle Gale said in the memo. “We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding.”

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s top priority, committing all resources to keeping pace with rivals like Google and OpenAI. That’s led to changes to Meta’s workforce and the way it operates. The company has gone through waves of layoffs over recent years, as Zuckerberg has pushed for increased efficiency. He has encouraged engineers to use AI agents to assist with coding and other tasks, outlined plans to track employees’ devices to improve the technology, and spent time coding his own AI-powered assistant to handle some of his CEO duties, like soliciting employee feedback.

These changes have left Meta employees both frustrated and anxious. More than a thousand have signed a petition addressed to Zuckerberg and other leaders of the company demanding that it refrain from collecting their data from devices — which can be as granular as gathering keystrokes, mouse movements and screen content — in the effort to train AI. Others have taken to social media to post about how the threat of layoffs has impacted their work and morale.

Additional reporting Bloomberg