Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is well known for running some pretty high-stakes experiments with his companies. His latest, it seems, is to gut the tech giant of its human workers and replace them with AI.
In an internal memo viewed by Business Insider, Meta executives told workers in the firm’s risk management division their jobs will be “eliminated” thanks to advances in automation.
Michael Protti, Meta’s chief compliance officer, told risk management workers on Wednesday that the corporation would be moving toward an automated risk process instead.
“As a result, we don’t need as many roles in some areas as we once did,” he wrote in the memo, per BI. Protti fell short of explaining how many jobs were being automated, though added that the tech giant had made “significant progress” in “building more global technical controls” in the risk management process.
“This standardization means that many routine decisions can now be handled efficiently by technology, freeing our teams to focus on the most complex and high-impact challenges,” Protti said.
In the corporate world, risk management is the task of identifying and reducing threats to a company’s earnings or operations. There are tons of risks that can rear their head — from cybersecurity threats to negative hits to reputation, it can be a pretty complicated job.
That makes it all the more baffling that Meta feels ready to hand off the role to notoriously buggy AI. Whether or not it can do the job remains to be seen — similar initiatives have failed spectacularly, like Klarna’s recent bid to automate its customer service department with AI.
In a devilish twist, AI itself has been a pretty big cause for concern for human risk managers. On top of its 95 percent failure rate in corporate settings, the buzzy new tech introduces a host of never-before seen threats to the business environment, like gaps in cybersecurity or vulnerability to manipulation. For example, a car dealership in California took a big loss when a customer versed in AI-prompt hacking managed to sucker a customer service chatbot into selling him a brand new 2024 Chevy Tahoe for one dollar.
Meta recently fired some 600 employees from its AI Superintelligence lab, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg had recently been shelling out billions to recruit new talent.
Whether this gamble pays off for Meta’s executives, the move underscores a growing reality in tech: not even those building AI are safe from its disruptive reach.
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