Replacing people with AI doesn’t seem to be that easy to do, if you can look at Meta as an example.

Reuters reports that in an internal meeting on Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the pace of development of AI agents had not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected.

Earlier this year, Meta laid off about 8,000 employees (about 10% of its corporate workforce) and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reported.

During this week’s meeting, Zuckerberg apparently commented on these job cuts, noting that they were not as “clean” as they should have been. The cuts were made because the company’s top officials “were concerned that we were not going to act quickly enough to adapt” to the changing landscape of the tech industry, Zuckerberg reportedly added.

The corporate leader also reportedly said that the perceived advantages of the new AI-focused business structure had not “come to fruition yet,” although he said he believed the company would begin to see improvements in its AI investments over the next three to six months. Several other investigative reports have described Meta’s months-old artificial intelligence unit as a grinding gulag, according to some of the engineers assigned to it.

Meta has invested heavily in AI and is expected to spend up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Reuters reports.

TechCrunch reached out to Meta for comment.