Zuckerberg's Longest-Serving Employee Speaks Out on AI and the Future of Meta Jobs

When Naomi Gleit joined the company that became Meta nearly 20 years ago, she was its 29th employee. Today she is the firm's longest-serving staff member apart from founder Mark Zuckerberg, and in a new interview with the BBC, Meta's head of product offered a measured but pointed read on what artificial intelligence will do to jobs. Speaking to the BBC during a visit to the UK, Gleit said there is no doubt AI will transform the workforce, yet she remains optimistic that it will create new, as yet unknown roles. Here at Metaintro we track exactly these signals so you can plan your next move with clarity rather than fear.

What Did Meta's Longest-Serving Employee Actually Say About AI and Jobs?

Gleit joined the company at age 21, back when it was a start-up called Facebook, and has stayed through two decades of growth, scandal and reinvention. She told the BBC that working at Meta was her dream job, even though her family once took some persuading. Her mother, she joked, had wanted her to work for Lehman Brothers, the investment bank that collapsed in 2008 and triggered a global financial crisis. The contrast is telling. The safe, prestigious career path her parents imagined did not survive the decade, while the risky tech bet did. That is a useful frame for anyone weighing a career decision in an uncertain market right now.

On AI specifically, Gleit was careful not to promise that no jobs would be lost. She acknowledged that AI will transform work, but she anchored her optimism in her own history. When I was growing up my job as a product manager didn't exist because there was no internet, she told the BBC. The point is that entire job categories appear that nobody could have named a generation earlier. Product management, growth marketing, data engineering and dozens of other roles are recent inventions. Her bet is that the next wave of AI will do the same, even as it reshapes or removes some of the work people do today.

It is worth being precise about the kind of optimism she offered, because there are two versions and they lead to very different career advice. The naive version says AI will simply lift everyone, so no preparation is needed. Gleit did not say that. Her version is closer to a creative-destruction argument. Old roles get hollowed out, new ones appear, and the workers who end up better off are the ones who move toward the new categories early. That distinction matters for how you plan. If you assume the optimistic story means you can sit still, you are exposed. If you read it as a signal to start positioning now, it becomes a reason to act rather than an excuse to wait. The structural shift in software work, where AI tools change what a developer's day looks like rather than erasing the role outright, is a clear example of this, as our map of the 2026 coding career shift lays out in detail.

What Are AI Agents, and Why Is Meta Betting on Them?

Gleit came to the UK this week specifically to talk about Meta's latest big push, which is AI agents. Agents are an advanced form of chatbot. Unlike a basic assistant that only answers questions, an agent can fully carry out tasks on a user's behalf, from drafting replies to closing a sale. Gleit described these agents as superpowers for small firms that cannot afford to hire large teams to handle customer messages around the clock.

The rollout is happening inside WhatsApp, which counts hundreds of millions of business users among the roughly 3.5 billion people worldwide who use the platform. Meta plans to charge businesses, large and small, to have AI agents running their WhatsApp customer chats day and night while surfacing business insights. We're really focused on what businesses need, and what they tell us is they're getting so many messages from people, Gleit told the BBC. The pitch is that agents will help firms cope with that volume better than existing tools.

There is a real economic logic underneath the marketing language. Gleit argued that agents give small businesses access to customer insights that were previously available mostly to large companies, the kind that could afford to hire entire teams to do the work manually. In other words, the technology is partly a substitute for headcount that smaller firms never had the budget to add in the first place. For a corner shop or a single-owner service business, that may genuinely expand what is possible. For larger employers that already staff support and analytics teams, the same tool reads very differently, because it points at work that humans are currently paid to do. Both effects are real at once, which is why blanket predictions about AI and jobs tend to mislead. The honest answer is that the impact depends heavily on the size of the employer and the type of task.

For job seekers, the agent story matters because it shows where the work is moving. Roles built purely around answering repetitive customer queries are most exposed. Roles that involve designing, supervising, escalating and improving these systems are the ones being created. We explored that same shift in our look at how AI is reshaping work rather than simply destroying it in our coverage of AI transforming jobs without destroying them.

How Reliable Are These AI Agents for the People Who Use Them?

Optimism aside, the technology is far from flawless, and Gleit did not pretend otherwise. Questions remain about the reliability of AI agents, and there are real concerns that their autonomy could lead them to act erratically. Earlier this week Meta had to fix an issue that allowed hackers to trick an Instagram AI support tool into giving them access to other users' accounts. Gleit said that particular problem was unrelated to the agent itself, and insisted that safety is the company's priority and focus.

That candor is worth noting. For workers, the gap between what AI agents promise and what they reliably deliver is precisely where human jobs survive. Someone has to catch the errors, manage the exceptions and reassure customers when an automated system gets it wrong. The more companies lean on agents, the more they need people who understand how those systems fail. This is the same dynamic the field has seen across the industry, as we covered when DeepMind's Demis Hassabis sent a blunt message to AI job cutters, warning that betting everything on automation too early is a mistake.

What Does This Mean for Your Career?

The honest read is mixed, and that is exactly why it is useful. AI is not a clean story of either mass unemployment or limitless new jobs. It is a reshuffling, and the workers who come out ahead are the ones who position themselves on the right side of it. Gleit's own advice to young people wrestling with how AI tools will affect their careers was simple. Be curious, she said. She pointed out that thanks to AI she is now able to code for the first time in her life, and that Zuckerberg, who was coding Facebook when she met him, is coding again himself. Even at work we are all learning new skills, she said.

That is the practical takeaway. The fastest way to stay employable is to learn the tools rather than ignore them. Workers who treat AI as something to experiment with, rather than something to fear or pretend away, build a durable edge. You do not need to become an engineer. You need to become fluent enough to use these systems, judge their output and explain to a manager how they help. For a structured way to do this, our guide to future-proofing your career in any industry breaks the process into concrete steps you can start this week.

It also helps to be realistic about timing. The same companies promoting AI as a job creator are cutting staff now to fund it. The roles that vanish and the roles that emerge rarely arrive on the same schedule, which is why building skills early matters so much.

How Does This Square With Meta's Own Layoffs?

There is an obvious tension in Gleit's optimism, and the interview did not dodge it. Meta is shedding staff even as it talks up AI as a creator of jobs. The company recently laid off about 10% of its employees, roughly 8,000 people, while pouring money into artificial intelligence, as Fortune reported. Reporting around the cuts indicated that thousands of remaining workers were being moved into newly created AI-focused teams, a reshuffle that touched a far larger share of the workforce than the layoffs alone, according to NPR. Coverage from The Next Web noted further cuts were planned for later in 2026, while TechRepublic confirmed the 10% figure. We dug into the broader context of this pivot in our piece on Meta's scramble to revive its AI edge.

Staff have also pushed back on how the AI build-out affects their own work. Employees objected to the use of keystroke monitoring designed to track their activity in order to train Meta's own AI tools. The company has since reportedly scaled back those plans, allowing employees to opt out, though only for 30 minutes at a time. The episode is a reminder that the AI transition is not only changing which jobs exist but also how existing jobs are measured and managed. Workers everywhere should expect more of their day-to-day output to become data that feeds the very systems reshaping their roles.

The friction is not confined to headquarters either. Earlier in the year, contractors connected to Meta's operations protested cuts tied to its AI hub restructuring, a story we followed in our coverage of the Dublin AI hub job cuts. The pattern across these episodes is consistent. A company can sincerely believe AI will create jobs in the long run while still cutting roles in the short run, and the workers caught in that gap do not get to wait for the long run to arrive. That is why the timing mismatch is not an abstract concern. It is the practical reality a lot of people are living through right now, and it argues for treating every quarter of a stable job as time to build the skills that travel to the next one.

What Should Workers Take From a 20-Year Insider's View?

Gleit's perspective carries weight precisely because she has watched one company live through wave after wave of technological change. Facebook's infamous move fast and break things motto, she argued, was a misunderstood value in isolation. The lesson she draws is not recklessness but a willingness to keep adapting. Twenty years in, she is learning to code. The job title she holds today did not exist when she started. That is the pattern she expects AI to repeat.

She was also notably warm about the boss most outsiders view skeptically. There is a huge gap, she said, between what people think of Zuckerberg and how he actually is, describing him as a great husband and a great dad to three young children, and crediting him with growing into the leader he has become. Asked what he is like as a boss, she settled, after a pause, on awesome, prompting a colleague to joke it would come up in her performance review. The personal coloring is easy to discount, but it carries a quieter signal for workers too. The people steering these AI decisions are not abstract forces. They are individuals making bets about where value and headcount should go, and understanding how those leaders think is part of reading where any given industry is heading next.

For workers, the message is to take the long view. Individual job titles are less stable than they used to be, but the underlying skills of curiosity, judgment and adaptability travel well across whatever new roles emerge. The people who struggled most in past technology shifts were not the ones who lacked credentials. They were the ones who assumed their current role would stay frozen in place. Treating your career as something you actively manage, rather than something that happens to you, is the single best hedge against an unpredictable decade. The tools will keep changing. Your ability to learn them is what compounds.

People Also Asked

Q: Who is Naomi Gleit and why does her view on AI matter?

A: Naomi Gleit is Meta's head of product and, after Mark Zuckerberg, its longest-serving employee, having joined as the 29th staffer nearly 20 years ago. Her view matters because she has watched one company survive repeated technology shifts from the inside, so her take on how AI will reshape jobs comes from two decades of lived experience rather than speculation.

Q: Will AI agents replace customer service and support jobs?

A: AI agents are most likely to absorb repetitive, high-volume tasks like answering routine customer messages, which puts purely scripted support roles at risk. Gleit argued the same tools also create new work in designing, supervising and improving those systems. The safest position is to move toward the roles that manage and correct the AI rather than the ones it can fully automate.

Q: How should workers prepare for the AI changes Gleit describes?

A: Gleit's own advice was to be curious and learn the tools early, noting that she is coding for the first time in her career. Practically, that means getting fluent enough with AI systems to use them, judge their output and explain their value to a manager. Building those skills while you hold a stable job is the strongest hedge against an uncertain market.

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