Meta is ramping up the pressure for its employees to use AI.
The Facebook parent company is tracking how extensively its teams are using AI through dashboards it rolled out earlier this year, and it created a game to boost employees' usage, Business Insider has learned.
Expectations around AI usage vary by teams. Staff in some departments are encouraged to play with AI tools, while others are being pushed to meet specific targets, according to four current employees.
Across Big Tech, companies are dangling both carrots and sticks to get employees on board with AI.
At Meta, engineers and staff are nudged to experiment with chatbots through games and badges, and they're also being tracked on dashboards and, in some cases, measured against specific adoption targets. Google is monitoring how many extra hours of productivity its engineers are squeezing out each week from AI tools and encouraging staff to try new tools, as Business Insider previously reported. Microsoft is trying to tie AI use to performance reviews. Other companies are buying software to monitor whether workers are leaning on AI enough.
The message is clear: Play along and be rewarded, or risk being left behind.
"It's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said the company is driving hard to use AI more internally. Speaking on Joe Rogan's podcast in January, he said he expected that by the end of 2025, Meta would have AI that can perform to the standard of a midlevel engineer.
On Meta's first-quarter earnings call in April, Zuckerberg shared more on the company's use of AI internally. "I'd expect that by the middle to end of next year, AI coding agents are going to be doing a substantial part of AI research and development," Zuckerberg stated.
Meta's hardware and virtual reality division, Reality Labs, is aiming to increase employees' usage of AI tools to above 75%, according to two of the people Business Insider spoke to. Currently, the division's usage rate is at 70%, a person familiar with the matter said. In June, the division had reached a utilization rate of 30%, according to two sources.
Meta's software engineers and researchers are using AI assistants to generate code templates or write code to speed up their work, current employees say. In other areas of the business, workers use AI to brainstorm ideas, create collaborative workspaces, ask about company policies, and ask it to make suggestions on a draft, and write.
To spur employees to embrace AI, Meta launched a voluntary program earlier this year called "Level Up" that turns AI adoption into a game. The game is designed to help employees get comfortable working with AI tools and can be accessed through its internal AI chatbot, known as Metamate. Employees are rewarded with badges as they hit different usage level milestones.
Three worker-tracking software providers previously told Business Insider that over the past two years, they've seen demand for monitoring employees' AI usage soar. That's because they want to see if AI adoption pays off and unlocks cost savings or productivity gains.
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