Meta Platforms is reportedly encouraging employees to use its internal AI chatbot, Metamate, to help draft year-end performance reviews — just days after the company laid off around 600 workers from its artificial intelligence division.
Business Insider reported that the tech giant has begun urging managers and employees to rely on the in-house tool for self-assessments and peer evaluations. The move reflects Meta’s twin priorities: aggressively streamlining its workforce while embedding AI deeper into its daily operations.
The Metamate platform functions similarly to ChatGPT, scanning internal documents, messages, and project summaries to assemble detailed performance narratives. The chatbot was developed as part of Meta’s internal AI suite to automate and simplify corporate workflows. Company executives describe it as a way to reduce the administrative burden of one of the workplace’s most time-consuming rituals — writing and reviewing annual appraisals.
Speaking at the TechEquity AI Summit in Sunnyvale, California, Joseph Spisak, Product Director at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, said he regularly uses Metamate for his own reviews. “It can search all my docs and what I’ve done and summarise what I’ve done for the year and my accomplishments and feedback on me,” Spisak said, calling the feature “great”. He described it as a “personal work historian” capable of generating detailed records in seconds.
According to Business Insider, Meta has not mandated the use of Metamate across teams, and adoption remains uneven. Some employees use it extensively to prepare evaluations, while others rely on it mainly to draft initial templates. One employee told the outlet that while the tool helps frame feedback, it struggles without sufficient project-level detail, requiring manual editing to ensure accuracy and nuance.
Layoffs deepen Meta’s AI transition
The company’s internal push for AI-assisted review tools comes amid significant restructuring in its artificial intelligence organisation. Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that around 600 roles were cut across Meta’s AI infrastructure, Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), and related product groups. The layoffs were part of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described as Meta’s “year of efficiency,” a drive to flatten management layers and accelerate execution.
In an internal memo, Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer, reportedly told employees the job cuts were designed to make the organisation “more agile and efficient,” while giving remaining staff “a greater scope of impact.”
The company said affected employees would receive 16 weeks of severance pay, plus additional compensation based on tenure. Newer hires in Superintelligence Labs, which drives Meta’s most advanced AI projects, are said to have been largely unaffected.
Efficiency and automation
The juxtaposition of job cuts and AI-enabled performance reviews has fuelled discussion about how automation is transforming the modern workplace — even within the companies building such tools. Analysts say Meta’s use of AI for internal evaluation could become a model for large enterprises seeking to reduce administrative overhead and measure productivity more consistently.
For Meta, the strategy fits its broader ambition to embed generative AI across its platforms and internal operations, from advertising optimisation to employee management. As Zuckerberg seeks to balance cost control with innovation, the company’s “AI-first” approach now extends as much to its workforce as to its products.