Meta has quietly released Pocket, an AI-powered app that generates small interactive games from text prompts, just as CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted internally that the company's AI agent development has fallen behind expectations. The app, confirmed on the App Store and Google Play on June 29, arrives alongside a more candid internal reckoning about the pace of the company's AI restructuring.
Pocket's experimental launch
The app builds on Meta's acquisition earlier this year of the team behind Gizmo, a platform that had accumulated 635,000 lifetime installs and a 98 percent positive sentiment rating before the deal. Pocket adds a scrollable discovery feed of content created by others, extending Meta's suite of consumer AI tools that already includes image generation, video creation via Vibes, and AI features in the Edits app. The company has not officially announced the app, a signal that the product remains in early experimentation.
Agent development misses the mark
At a company town hall, Zuckerberg told employees that AI agent progress had not accelerated as rapidly as leadership had hoped, and that the benefits of the company's AI-focused restructuring had not yet materialized. He said improvements could begin to appear within three to six months. The admission comes after Meta laid off about 8,000 employees-roughly 10 percent of its corporate workforce-and reassigned another 7,000 to AI-focused teams, including a unit called Agent Transformation. Zuckerberg acknowledged the cuts "had not been executed as cleanly as intended," according to an internal summary, and were driven by concerns the company was not adapting quickly enough. The slower-than-expected pace of AI agent development underscores the difficulties in turning AI Agents & Automation promises into production-ready systems. Meta expects to spend up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, a figure that signals how heavily the company is betting on AI even as its internal execution faces turbulence.
Why this matters for IT and Development
Meta's restructuring, which shifted thousands of workers into AI-focused roles, signals a broader industry trend that directly affects IT and development professionals. As companies pour resources into agent-based systems and automation, the skills required to build, deploy, and manage these tools evolve quickly. The $145 billion infrastructure investment and the creation of units like Agent Transformation show that even the largest tech firms are still wrangling with the fundamentals of making AI agents practical. Professionals working in AI for IT & Development should watch how Meta's experiment with Pocket and its internal struggles influence hiring, tooling, and project priorities in the coming quarters.
Your membership also unlocks:
