Mark Zuckerberg's longest-serving employee on AI, jobs - and her boss

An important development from the financial markets: Mark Zuckerberg's longest-serving employee on AI, jobs - and her boss35 minutes ago Share Save Add as preferred on GoogleZoe KleinmanTechnology editorBBCWhen Naomi Gleit joined Meta nearly 20 years ago, she was the firm's 29th employee. Today, she is its longest serving staff member - apart, that is, from founder Mark Zuckerberg. Since joining him at the age of 21, Gleit has watched a start-up called Facebook transform into a tech giant called Meta, and weathered many storms and controversies along the way.

Now head of product, she told the working at Meta was her "dream job" - even if, two decades ago, her family took some persuading that she'd made the right decision. "My mom was very disappointed, she wanted me to work for Lehman Brothers," she laughs. The investment bank collapsed in 2008, triggering a global financial crisis.

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Meta, meanwhile, is still going strong but has experienced its own earthquakes: from privacy scandals and election rigging accusations to teen mental health crises and toxic online harms. Zuckerberg's 'unfair' reputationGleit acknowledges there have been moments where the company "didn't meet our standards" or missed the mark. But she says there is much she is proud of too - and Facebook's infamous "move fast and break things" motto was a "misunderstood value in isolation".

Similarly, she feels Mark Zuckerberg's tech bro bad guy reputation is "unfair". To some, Zuckerberg is an archetypal big tech boss - worthy of scrutiny not just for his company's scandals but also for seeming cold, robotic and ruthless. Actor Jesse Eisenberg, who played the Facebook founder in 2010 film The Social Network about the firm's origins, told the last February he did not want to think of himself as associated with him and his "problematic" actions.

Succession star Jeremy Strong will soon portray Zuckerberg as the more steely, savvy boss behind a huge social media empire in follow-up, The Social Reckoning. via Getty ImagesUS lawmakers have grilled Zuckerberg about his firm's practices on several occasions"I think that the difference between what people think of Mark and how Mark actually is, is huge," Gleit says. "He's also a great husband and a great dad to three little kids, and it's been really incredible to watch just how he's become the leader that he is today," Gleit says.

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There's a slightly pregnant pause when I ask Gleit what Zuckerberg is like as a boss, before she settles on "awesome". One of her team jokes that this will come up in her appraisal. AI transformationGleit came to the UK this week from Meta's US HQ to talk about the firm's latest big disruptor: AI agents.

Agents are like an advanced form of chatbot - capable not just of answering questions but able to fully carry out tasks. Gleit says these agents can be "superpowers" for small firms, so Meta is incorporating them into WhatsApp, which counts hundreds of millions of business users among the 3. 5 billion people worldwide who are on the platform.

Economists are analysing what the news means for the markets.