Mark Zuckerberg's longest-serving employee on AI, jobs and her boss
Naomi Gleit says Meta’s AI agents could help businesses, but the technology will also reshape work. She also pushes back on criticism of Mark Zuckerberg.
Intelligence analysis by GPT-5.4 Mini
Naomi Gleit, Meta’s longest-serving employee after Zuckerberg, says the company sees AI agents as a major business tool, especially for WhatsApp. She argues the technology will change jobs but could also create new ones, while defending Zuckerberg’s leadership and character.
A longtime Meta worker says the company wants computer helpers to answer business messages and do small tasks, like a shop assistant that never sleeps. She thinks some jobs will change, but new ones may appear too, like how the internet created jobs that did not exist before.
Analysis
Meta’s AI push
Naomi Gleit has been at Meta for nearly 20 years, long enough to see Facebook grow from a startup into a global platform and then into a company repeatedly tested by privacy scandals, election concerns and criticism over online harms. She now leads product, and in this interview she says Meta’s latest focus is AI agents: tools that go beyond answering questions and can complete tasks on behalf of users or businesses.
Gleit says Meta wants to build these agents into WhatsApp, where the company already serves hundreds of millions of business users. The plan is to charge businesses to have AI agents handle customer chats around the clock and to provide business insights. Her case is that small firms can use this to access capabilities that are usually reserved for larger companies with bigger staffs.
Jobs, safety and leadership
The story also underlines the concern that more autonomous AI tools may misbehave or be unreliable. The BBC notes that Meta recently had to fix an issue involving an Instagram AI support tool that could be tricked into exposing access to other users’ accounts. Gleit says that problem was separate from the agent idea itself and insists safety is Meta’s “priority and focus.”
On jobs, she accepts that AI will “transform” the workforce, but says new jobs will emerge, comparing the moment to her own role as a product manager, which she says did not exist when she was growing up because there was no internet. She also defends Zuckerberg against the common “tech bro” image, saying the gap between public perception and reality is large, and describing him as both a good leader and a family man.
Key points
- Naomi Gleit is Meta’s longest-serving employee after Mark Zuckerberg.
- Meta is building AI agents into WhatsApp for business customer chats and insights.
- Gleit says AI will transform work, but she expects new jobs to appear.
- She rejects the idea that Zuckerberg’s public reputation fully matches the person she knows.
- Meta’s AI plans sit alongside staff cuts and concerns about monitoring and security.
If Meta’s AI agents work as described, small businesses could get around-the-clock help with customer messages and insights they usually could not afford. That could make WhatsApp a stronger business tool and help companies respond faster to customers.
The article also shows how fragile these systems can be: Meta recently had to fix an AI support issue tied to Instagram. If AI agents act unpredictably or create security problems, businesses may be cautious about relying on them, and staff reductions could deepen anxiety about who benefits from the technology.
