Meta is experiencing many conflicting opinions within the company when strongly promoting the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the working environment, while also bringing the level of AI use of employees into performance evaluation.
According to information shared internally last month, Meta announced that it will monitor many activities on employees' computers in the US, including typing content, mouse operations, click positions and what appears on the screen.
The company said that the goal is to collect data to train AI models to understand how people actually complete their daily work.
This announcement immediately caused strong reactions from many employees. In internal exchanges, some people called this an act of privacy infringement and creating a feeling of being over-supervised.
A technical manager wrote that the tracking program made them "extremely uncomfortable" and questioned whether employees could refuse to participate. However, Meta's Chief Technology Officer - Mr. Andrew Bosworth - replied that there is no option to refuse on the company's computer.
The tension is taking place in the context that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making big bets on AI. Meta has spent hundreds of billions of USD on data centers, AI models and "super-intelligence" projects, while integrating AI deeper into platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Not only promoting the use of AI, Meta also requires about 78,000 employees to apply this technology in their work.
According to many current and former employees, the company even built internal control panels to monitor the amount of "AI tokens" each person uses, creating competitive pressure among colleagues.
Some employees said that they have to constantly create "AI agents" to support work, and even the situation of using AI to manage or evaluate other AIs has emerged.
At the same time, Meta announced that it will cut about 10% of its workforce. According to the plan, about 8,000 people may be affected in the layoffs taking place this month.
This causes anxiety to spread throughout the company, as many employees do not know if they are training technology itself to replace them.
Some people started looking for new jobs or trying to be on the payroll to receive severance benefits. On internal forums, many mocking images and countdown websites to the dismissal announcement day also appeared.
Experts believe that Meta is reflecting the general trend of the technology industry, where AI both helps increase productivity and creates great pressure on workers. Microsoft, Coinbase and Block have also had AI-related personnel streamlining in recent times.
Information technology expert Leo Boussioux (lecturer at the University of Washington) said that AI can help employees work more efficiently, but at the same time create new pressure in the working environment. According to him, there is currently no complete handbook for deploying AI in businesses.
On Meta's side, the company affirmed that the data collected from employees is only for AI training purposes and has taken measures to protect sensitive information. Mr. Mark Zuckerberg also denied using this data to monitor personal performance.
However, in the context of AI increasingly developing rapidly, even Meta leaders admit that they cannot yet determine the optimal personnel size of the company in the future.
