Priscilla Chan (left), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Lauren Sanchez are among the guests attending Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th US President on January 20, 2025, in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC.
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Meta announced Thursday that it will lay off an undisclosed number of employees in its risk department as the company uses artificial intelligence to automate its compliance review process.
Michel Protti, Meta’s chief privacy and compliance officer for products, revealed the layoffs to members of the company’s risk department on Wednesday, Business Insider reported. CNBC confirmed the content.
Meta’s risk organization is tasked with assessing and documenting the risks of various products and features and ensuring the company is compliant with regulatory authorities around the world. The organization was created after the company formerly known as Facebook was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission as part of a settlement that also required the social media giant to restructure its approach to privacy.
The layoffs come amid a broader reorganization at Meta, which includes Wednesday’s decision to lay off about 600 employees in the company’s Superintelligence Lab AI division. However, the layoffs did not affect the TBD Labs division, which is the top division within Meta’s AI division.
“Through our Product Risk and Compliance team, we have built one of the most sophisticated compliance programs in the industry to help evaluate our products and capabilities,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We regularly make organizational changes, rebuilding our teams to reflect the maturity of our programs and innovate faster while maintaining high compliance standards.”
Meta promoted Mr. Protti to head its privacy program in 2019 following the company’s settlement with the FTC related to its Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal.
The social media company has spent the past year developing AI technology to streamline risk management. A Meta spokesperson said the company’s revamped risk management system relies on more basic automation rather than cutting-edge AI technology that can generate persuasive text based on written prompts.
Rob Sherman, Meta’s vice president of policy, said in a June LinkedIn post that the company “has built tools that allow teams to automatically identify when legal or policy requirements apply to a particular product.”
“We are not using AI to make decisions about risk,” Sherman wrote. “Instead, the rules are applied using automation, reducing the time experts spend on ratified decisions, while at the same time increasing reliability by leaving less room for human error.”
Other companies are also increasingly pointing to the use of AI technology to reduce their workforce.
Big banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are touting AI projects to boost profitability while slowing headcount growth. CNBC reported last week that JPMorgan’s finance chief, Jeremy Burnham, told analysts during the company’s latest earnings call that bank leaders are being told to avoid hiring due to the widespread deployment of AI.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in September that the software vendor would cut 4,000 customer support roles, citing improved AI capabilities and the “benefits and efficiencies” of the company’s Agentforce software.
Salesforce said in a statement at the time, “The number of support cases we handle has decreased, and we no longer need to actively fill support engineer roles.”
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