Imagine a world where your boss says she doesn't have time to meet with you, but she's sending her AI to meet with you instead. That world may not, in fact, be too far in the future.

Meta is said to be building an AI "clone" of Mark Zuckerberg which will be capable of interacting with staff — and presuably attending meetings — when Zuck himself isn't available. The Financial Times had the story of this AI Zuck, and as ABC 7 reports, the clone is "being trained on Zuckerberg's mannerisms, tone and how to give public statements."

A robot clone can't be any worse than the real thing, amirite?

The AI version of Zuck is also, allegedly, "learning company strategy and how to give advice to employees."

Ugh this feels really dystopian already, as if everything else didn't already.

At some point, maybe entire divisions of the company will just be run by AI agents — and that seems to be where Meta might be going with this.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Zuck's agent, which is still in development, is already helping him by "retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get."

And, apparently, the project reflects Zuckerberg's priorities to "accelerate the pace of work, eliminate layers from its organizational structure and change the day-to-day jobs of its employees to remain competitive with AI-native startups with much smaller staffs," per the Journal.

Employees across the company are being pushed to employ AI wherever they can to do their jobs. According to the Journal, Meta employees' usage of AI is now an integral part of their performance reviews.

Meta's acquisitions in recent months also point to the company's uses of AI internally, including the acquisition of Moltbook in March — which is a "social network for AI agents" that is apparently helping employees' personal agents communicate with each other.

And, per the Journal, Meta also acquired the Singapore-based startup Manus, which creates personal agents for users in order to execute specific tasks.

There is reportedly a lot of talk inside Meta about being competitive with "AI-native" startups, and creating engineering teams that are "AI-native" and "ultraflat."  All of this understandably has employees nervous about mass layoffs, which are all but certainly coming.

Last month, a report suggested that execs at Meta have plans to lay off as many as 16,000 employees, whittling down the headcount which has risen since the last big rounds of layoffs in 2023 — the year that Zuckerberg declared would be the "year of efficiency."

Meta had an employee headcount of around 79,000 as of December, despite laying off around 21,000 employees just two years earlier.

Previously: Report: Meta Planning to Lay Off 16,000 Employees In AI-Driven Move to Cut Costs

Top image: The metaverse avatar for Zuckerberg created several years back for Meta Quest.