Meta’s Longest-Serving Employee Makes the Case for AI Agents and Her Boss

BBC Business reported Thursday that Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product and its longest-tenured employee outside founder Mark Zuckerberg, is championing Meta AI agents as a transformative tool for small businesses worldwide.

Gleit joined what was then a fledgling startup called Facebook nearly two decades ago as its 29th employee. She was 21 years old. Her mother, she recalled with a laugh, had hoped she would take a job at Lehman Brothers instead. That bank collapsed in 2008. Meta did not.

From Startup to Tech Giant

The journey has not been without turbulence. Gleit acknowledged there were periods when the company fell short of its own standards, citing privacy controversies, allegations of election interference, and concerns over teen mental health on its platforms. Still, she pushed back on the characterisation of Meta’s old “move fast and break things” philosophy as reckless, calling it a value that was frequently misunderstood when taken out of context.

She also defended Zuckerberg personally. His reputation as a cold, calculating tech mogul, a portrayal recently reinforced by actor Jesse Eisenberg and soon to be revisited in a new film starring Jeremy Strong, does not match the person she has worked alongside, she said. “The difference between what people think of Mark and how Mark actually is, is huge,” she told the BBC.

Also Read: What Is an AI Agent and Why Does It Matter for Business?

AI Agents Take Center Stage

Gleit travelled to the UK this week to discuss Meta’s push into AI agents, a more capable class of AI that does not merely answer queries but executes tasks autonomously. Meta plans to embed these agents into WhatsApp, which serves roughly 3.5 billion users globally, including hundreds of millions of businesses.

The company intends to charge businesses of all sizes to deploy AI agents that can handle customer conversations around the clock and surface actionable insights. Gleit argued smaller firms stand to gain the most, gaining access to analytics and customer intelligence that previously required large teams to generate.

Job Disruption Remains an Open Question

The optimism comes with caveats. Meta recently cut approximately 10% of its global workforce while simultaneously ramping up AI investment. Internal friction has also emerged over keystroke monitoring used to generate training data for Meta’s AI systems. The company reportedly scaled back those plans after employee pushback.

On broader job displacement, Gleit argued that AI will create entirely new roles that do not yet exist, noting that her own title, product manager, was unrecognisable before the internet era. Whether that optimism matches the pace of current displacement remains an open debate across the industry.

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