Meta Platforms is building a photorealistic, artificial intelligence-powered version of its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg that can interact with employees, answer questions, and deliver feedback in his voice and style, according to reporting first published by the Financial Times.
The system is being trained on Zuckerberg’s mannerisms, speaking tone, public statements, and thinking on company strategy. Zuckerberg is personally involved in testing and training the avatar, with sources telling the Financial Times the goal is for employees to feel more directly connected to the founder. The company employs nearly 79,000 people globally, the vast majority of whom have no direct access to its chief executive.
The initiative is separate from a second internal project, a “chief executive agent” previously reported by the Wall Street Journal, which Zuckerberg is building to help himself retrieve information and navigate decision-making more efficiently.
The employee-facing avatar fits into a broader restructuring of how Meta operates. At a January earnings call, Zuckerberg described a shift toward fewer management layers and greater reliance on automated systems. “We’re investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done. We’re elevating individual contributors and flattening teams,” he said. The company has also been encouraging employees to use AI tools in engineering and product workflows, a push that has, according to the Financial Times, sparked internal anxieties about potential job cuts.
If the Zuckerberg avatar succeeds internally, Meta reportedly plans to offer the technology to creators and influencers so they can build high-fidelity AI versions of themselves for fan engagement at scale. The project draws on Meta’s own Llama large language models and a corpus of the chief executive’s publicly available remarks, blog posts, and earnings call transcripts.
The development is drawing scrutiny beyond the company. Critics have described the initiative as an extension of Meta’s wider push to replace human communication layers with AI systems, raising questions about accountability when a machine trained on the boss’s thinking delivers guidance that employees may treat as authoritative.
Meta’s AI push is also unfolding alongside intensifying regulatory pressure. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government was consulting on whether to ban social media access for children under 16, adding that algorithmic design features driving compulsive scrolling were “really problematic” and needed to go.
Meta has not publicly commented on the Financial Times report. The company has previously acknowledged building AI characters capable of real-time interaction and has stated its ambition to develop what it calls personal superintelligence.
