A senior Meta executive overseeing the company’s metaverse efforts told staff to embed artificial intelligence across day-to-day work and push for a dramatic jump in output, urging teams to “go 5X faster” in an internal message. The post, signed by Vishal Shah, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, carried the headline “Metaverse AI4P: Think 5X, not 5%,” (AI4P is AI for Productivity).
Shah framed the push as more than a slogan. He argued engineers and other staff should treat AI as a standard tool, not an experiment, and insisted the aim was a fivefold increase in throughput rather than a modest efficiency gain. He wrote that programmers should be using AI to work five times more efficiently than they are currently working—not just using it to go 5 percent more efficiently.
“Our goal is simple yet audacious: make Al a habit, not a novelty. This means prioritizing training and adoption for everyone, so that using Al becomes second nature—just like any other tool we rely on,” the message read. “It also means integrating Al into every major codebase and workflow.”
Shah made clear the expectation reaches beyond software engineers. “I want to see PMs, designers, and [cross functional] partners rolling up their sleeves and building prototypes, fixing bugs, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible,” he wrote. “I want to see us go 5X faster by eliminating the frictions that slow us down. And 5X faster to get to how our products feel much more quickly. Imagine a world where anyone can rapidly prototype an idea, and feedback loops are measured in hours—not weeks. That's the future we're building.”
Those comments follow public remarks from Mark Zuckerberg about AI writing large portions of Meta’s code in the coming year to year and a half. The company has also adjusted hiring practices, saying job candidates may rely on AI when completing coding tests in interviews.
Shah’s memo highlights a concern many employees have voiced: managers are not only preparing to replace some roles with AI, they also expect remaining staff to adopt AI and substantially raise their individual outputs. The unstated implication is that the quality of work produced without AI will no longer meet the organization’s standards.
The push at Meta mirrors moves across major tech firms. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told workers in July, “In the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” a comment that underscores company-level planning for fewer roles as automation expands.
At the team level, experienced software engineers report new complications tied to AI coding agents. Those tools can generate large amounts of code quickly but sometimes introduce bugs, opaque logic and integration issues that are hard to trace. Engineers say they often end up in a caretaker role, debugging or rewriting AI-produced code they did not author.
In the internal note, Shah set an explicit adoption target. “we expect 80 percent of Metaverse employees to have integrated AI into their daily work routines by the end of this year, with rapid growth in engineering usage and a relentless focus on learning from the time and output we gain,” he wrote. He pointed employees to upcoming internal training and documentation about AI coding, and announced two “Metaverse day of AI learning” events.
He urged staff to commit time to training and to share insights across teams. “Dedicate the time. Take the training seriously. Share what you learn, and don’t be afraid to experiment,” he added, then emphasized that intensifying the effort would produce larger returns and a substantial leap in productivity rather than marginal tweaks to existing processes.
Shah closed the post with a graphic showing a futuristic building overlaid with the phrase “Metaverse AI4P Think 5X, not 5%.”
A Meta spokesperson said, “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.”