Priscilla Chan, left, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Lauren Sanchez are among guests attending Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th U.S. president in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2025.
Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images
Meta said Thursday that it’s laying off an undisclosed number of employees in its risk organization as the company shifts to use artificial intelligence to automate its compliance review process.
Michel Protti, Meta’s chief privacy and compliance officer for product, disclosed the layoffs on Wednesday to members of the company’s risk organization, according to a report by Business Insider. CNBC confirmed the contents of that story.
Meta’s risk organization is tasked with assessing and documenting various product and feature risks and ensure that the company is complying with regulators worldwide. The organization was established after the company formerly known as Facebook was slapped with a $5 billion fine by the Federal Trade Commission as part of a settlement that also required that the social media giant restructure its approach to privacy.
The job reductions come amid broader organizational restructurings at Meta, including its decision on Wednesday to lay off about 600 employees who work in the company’s Superintelligence Labs AI unit. The cuts, however, did not impact Meta’s top-tier TBD Labs division within the AI unit.
“Through our product risk and compliance team, we’ve built one of the most sophisticated compliance programs in the industry to help us evaluate our products and features,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We routinely make organizational changes and are restructuring our team to reflect the maturity of our program and innovate faster while maintaining high compliance standards.”
Meta promoted Protti to lead the company’s privacy program in 2019 following the settlement with the FTC related to the company’s Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal.
The social media company has spent the past year developing AI technology to streamline risk management. The Meta spokesperson said that the company’s revamped risk management system relies on more basic automation rather than more bleeding-edge AI technologies that can generate compelling text based on written prompts.
Meta Vice President of Policy Rob Sherman said in a June LinkedIn post that the company “built a tool that helps teams automatically identify when legal and policy requirements apply to specific products.”
“We’re not using AI to make decisions on risk,” Sherman wrote. “Instead, the rules are applied using automation, reducing time experts need to spend on the ratified decisions, while increasing reliability because there’s less room for human error.”
Other companies are also increasingly pointing to the use of AI technologies to reduce their workforce.
Major banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are pitching AI projects to bolster profitability while slowing headcount growth. JPMorgan finance chief Jeremy Barnum told analysts during the firm’s most recent earnings report that bank managers have been directed to avoid hiring people amid a broader AI rollout, CNBC reported last week.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in September that his software vendor would cut 4,000 customer support roles because of AI’s growing capabilities and the “benefits and efficiencies” of the company’s Agentforce software.
“We’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles,” Salesforce said in a statement at the time.
WATCH: A rotation out of the US is a bet against the AI trade.
