• Meta reassigned thousands of staff to work in a new AI unit created by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
• Employees say they're getting "drafted" and expect the work to involve data labeling.
• Meta wants to leverage its own workforce to gain an edge in the AI race.

For thousands of Meta employees, it's now the AI way or the highway.

As 8,000 Meta employees were reading their layoff notices on Wednesday, 7,000 others opened a very different email. They had been selected to join a new AI initiative spun up directly by CEO Mark Zuckerberg — and it would be crucial to accelerating Meta's position in the AI race.

Many employees learned they would move into a group called Applied AI (AAI), which Meta created earlier this year, led by engineering vice president Maher Saba and reporting to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth.

Others were recruited to groups more specifically focused on AI agents. These include a group named "Agent Transformation Accelerator," headed by Bosworth, and a team named "Agent Data and Optimization," according to internal messages shared with Business Insider.

"This is a reflection of your impact," said one email, which told recipients they were picked for their "strong performance" and technical abilities, a copy reviewed by Business Insider read.

"You were identified as someone who can make a real impact on this team," it added.

Amid this week's cuts to Meta's 78,000-person workforce, the reassignments to these AI teams have offered a lifeline for some staffers worried about getting let go, even if they are still uncertain about what their new roles entail.

Many companies are reorganizing around AI, with some, like Disney, tracking usage and others, like Visa, rewarding teams that build products faster. Meta has made especially sweeping changes. It has formed a superintelligence lab, organized teams into smaller AI-native "pods," and changed some employees' job titles to "AI builder."

"I got drafted," one person said in a Discord server where Meta employees discussed the layoffs.

"Welcome to the draft," another posted.

Meta's AI models have so far trailed those of rivals such as OpenAI and Google in performance, and leaders have identified an opportunity to enlist Meta employees to better train the technology.

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.

Inside Meta's AI draft

Joining the new initiative, it turns out, is non-negotiable — and different recruits have received the news with either relief, dread, or confusion, according to four employees who spoke with Business Insider and several forum posts.

On Blind, an anonymous workplace app, a section locked to verified Meta employees was flooded with posts from people announcing they had been drafted. Some asked what AAI actually does.

Two Meta employees said they expect the new AI task forces to involve data labeling — the grunt work of manually tagging images or correcting chatbot responses.

That's an area where Meta's AI chief, Alexandr Wang, has extensive experience. Wang is the cofounder and former CEO of Scale AI, one of the world's biggest data-labeling companies, which relies on armies of contractors to train AI.

Meta has been rolling out other AI initiatives internally. It has launched an internal tool to track employees' keystrokes and mouse movements, known as Model Capability Initiative, Business Insider previously reported.

An internal announcement in April about the software said that AI models still lacked the knowledge to outperform humans at technical tasks such as coding.

"For agents to understand how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers, we need to train our models on real examples," the post said.

In a leaked audio recording from an internal meeting that same month, Zuckerberg said that Wang knew the data-labeling world well, and then offered a blunt addendum: The average Meta employee has a "significantly higher" intelligence than those contractors — so he'd rather "enlist" top employees from across Meta to train its AI instead.

"I think that this is going to be a very big advantage, if we can do it," he said, adding that it remained a "hypothesis" for the time being.

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