Meta's Reality Labs chief is calling the 'most important' meeting of the year, urging employees to show up in person

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Andrew Bosworth, Meta CTO, is mid speech with his hands held aloft in front of him, as if emphasizing a point. He is standing in front of a light blue background and wearing a dark denim overshirt, which is open over a white undershirt. He is wearing a microphone on his face.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth is holding a meeting he called the "most important" of the year.
Managers are urging staff to attend in person, an unusual push for Reality Labs.
The meeting follows repeated cuts at Reality Labs as Meta shifts its focus toward AI.

Meta's Chief Technology Officer and head of Reality Labs, Andrew Bosworth, has called an all-hands meeting for January 14, describing it as the "most important" of the year.

Bosworth is also strongly recommending that Reality Labs employees attend the division's meeting in person, two Meta employees told Business Insider.

The emphasis on in-person attendance is unusual for the division, which oversees the company's wearables, virtual and augmented reality initiatives, and a nascent robotics unit, these employees said. Some managers have told employees to "drop what they're doing" to attend the all-hands in person, one employee told Business Insider.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the meeting.

While the division has seen some success, such as its Ray-Ban smart glasses, Reality Labs has been a costly venture for Meta, incurring losses of more than $70 billion since 2020.

Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shifted the company's strategic focus toward AI and away from the metaverse. In 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, as part of the major reset of the company's AI efforts. Meta then embarked on a multibillion-dollar hiring spree, poaching top-tier AI researchers and engineers from rivals such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.

Reality Labs has faced repeated rounds of cuts over the past year. In December, Business Insider reported that Meta was planning budget cuts up to 30% and considering job cuts in Reality Labs.

Last April, Meta laid off employees in Oculus Studios, its in-house gaming division, and the team behind Supernatural, the VR fitness app Meta acquired for over $400 million. Those cuts followed Meta's broader January 2025 layoffs that eliminated nearly 4,000 roles companywide, with at least 560 affecting Reality Labs employees.

In a memo obtained by Business Insider earlier last year, Bosworth referred to 2025 as "the most critical" year in his eight-year tenure at Reality Labs.

"This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure," he wrote.

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