When Naomi Gleit joined Meta just over 20 years ago, she was the company's 29th employee. Today, she is its longest-serving staff member apart from founder Mark Zuckerberg - a role she calls her "dream job", even if her family initially disapproved.
"My mom was very disappointed, she wanted me to work for Lehman Brothers," Gleit told the BBC. The investment bank collapsed in 2008, triggering a global financial crisis. Meta, meanwhile, has weathered its own storms: privacy scandals, election rigging accusations, teen mental health crises and toxic online harms.
“Meta's longest-serving employee Naomi Gleit defends Mark Zuckerberg and says AI agents will be 'superpowers' for small firms.”
Gleit acknowledges there have been moments where the company "didn't meet our standards", but says there is much she is proud of. She defends Zuckerberg's reputation as "unfair" and says the infamous motto "move fast and break things" was a "misunderstood value in isolation".
"I think that the difference between what people think of Mark and how Mark actually is, is huge," Gleit said. "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."
Asked what Zuckerberg is like as a boss, she paused before settling on "awesome". One of her team joked it would come up in her appraisal.
Gleit came to the UK this week from Meta's US headquarters to talk about the company's latest big disruptor: AI agents. These advanced chatbots can not only answer questions but also fully carry out tasks. Gleit says they can be "superpowers" for small firms, so Meta is incorporating them into WhatsApp, which has hundreds of millions of business users among 3.5 billion people worldwide.
The company plans to charge firms of all sizes to have AI agents.