Meta is building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg so employees can ‘talk to the boss’

The photorealistic digital character is trained on Zuckerberg’s mannerisms, tone, and his own thinking on company strategy. He is personally involved in testing it. The effort, described by four people familiar with the matter, is separate from a ‘CEO agent’ that handles tasks for Zuckerberg directly.

Meta is building a photorealistic, AI-powered version of Mark Zuckerberg that can interact with employees in his place, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing four people familiar with the matter.

The character is being developed by Meta’s Superintelligence Labs and is trained on Zuckerberg’s mannerisms, tone, and publicly available statements, as well as his own thinking on company strategy, so that employees, in the words of one person familiar with the project, ‘might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.’ Z

uckerberg is personally involved in training and testing the animated version of himself.

The effort is at an early stage and is separate from a different project, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, in which Meta is building a ‘CEO agent’ designed to help Zuckerberg himself retrieve information faster, a tool that assists him rather than stands in for him.

The AI character project is part of a broader push within Meta’s Superintelligence Labs to develop lifelike, AI-driven digital figures capable of real-time conversation. The technical challenge is substantial: achieving realism and preventing perceptible delays in conversation requires enormous computing power.

The project reflects a significant escalation of Zuckerberg’s own involvement in Meta’s AI work. According to people familiar with the matter, he has been spending five to ten hours a week writing code on various AI projects and attending technical engineering review sessions, an unusual level of hands-on engagement for a CEO running a $1.6 trillion company.

He has committed publicly to developing what he calls ‘personal superintelligence’ as Meta works to close the gap with OpenAI and Google. On a January earnings call, he said Meta was ‘elevating individual contributors and flattening teams’ through AI-native tooling.

Meta has a history with AI characters. In September 2023 it launched a range of celebrity-based chatbots, among them personas modelled on Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner, and Naomi Osaka, all of whom licensed their likenesses, but these were discontinued in the summer of 2024 after failing to gain meaningful traction.

Meta then opened an AI Studio allowing users and creators to build their own AI characters, but ran into controversy when users began generating sexually explicit personas. Since January, Meta has restricted teenager access to AI characters. Zuckerberg’s interest in the format was reportedly sharpened by the success of AI companion startup Character.AI, particularly with younger users.

Meta is not the only company exploring AI versions of its leadership. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during a podcast interview earlier this year that his employees had built an AI clone of him.

But the Zuckerberg project has a different scale and institutional purpose: it is being designed as a mechanism for a $1.6 trillion company’s 79,000 employees to feel a sense of connection to a founder who is, by any measure, difficult to reach.