(October 31, 2025) Amid major layoffs at Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a standout appointment to drive the company’s artificial intelligence ambitions forward. Vishal Shah, a long-time Meta executive known for his pioneering work on Instagram and the metaverse has been named to lead product management for Meta’s AI division. The move signals a decisive turn for the social media giant as it aims to position itself not merely as a social media platform, but as what the company’s AI chief Nat Friedman termed “an AI company.”
“We can’t just be an AI team; we need to be an AI company,” Friedman emphasized in a memo regarding Vishal Shah’s appointment, obtained by the Financial Times. “Vishal will be critical in leading the collaboration model, integrating teams, and ensuring scaled success,” mentioned Friedman.
Vishal Shah
From Instagram visionary to metaverse architect
Vishal Shah’s Meta journey began in 2015 when he joined the organization through Instagram. Over the next six years, he rose through the ranks to become Vice President of Product, shaping key features that deepened user engagement while maintaining the platform’s creative essence. His product intuition and leadership led him to helm Meta’s Reality Labs, the division driving metaverse technologies from virtual reality to smart glasses.
Shah’s academic roots are in engineering. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, he began his career as a software engineer before moving into digital marketing and leadership roles. At Meta, he was instrumental during one of the company’s defining moments of the 2021 rebrand from Facebook to Meta. In his own words, the shift reflected years of transformation. “Facebook as a company was more than just social media,” he said in an interview during that time. “We were running toward a future we’re really excited about — the next platform, which is the metaverse.”
Digital world with metaverse
Shah’s leadership of the metaverse initiative revealed his belief in immersive connectivity. He described it as “the successor to the mobile internet,” not a new internet but a new way to experience it. Shah explained. “It’s about presence — being inside a shared space, not just looking at a flat screen.” That presence, he argued, could transform how humans connect; from family catch-ups to collaborative workspaces.
He illustrated this idea through Horizon Workrooms, Meta’s early VR meeting tool, which enabled users to interact using avatars and spatial audio. The effect, he said, was a sense of shared space that video calls couldn’t replicate.
A new chapter: Leading Meta’s AI product vision
In his new role, Vishal Shah will oversee product development within Meta’s expanding AI ecosystem. The company’s AI initiatives span everything from generative tools to personal assistants and multimodal learning models. According to the Financial Times, Shah shared internally that he plans “to remain very involved in building bridges between (Meta’s Superintelligence Lab)] and (Reality Labs) that will enable to shape how the platform delivers personal superintelligence to billions of people across all devices.
That vision of connecting the deep research of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs with the experiential technologies of Reality Labs highlights his dual expertise of translating abstract innovation into tangible user experience.
Bridging the future
Shah’s appointment also symbolizes Meta’s strategic evolution. Under his leadership, the company aims to merge its immersive technologies with AI capabilities to create “personal superintelligence” which can be termed as AI systems that augment individual potential. If the metaverse represented where people interact, this next chapter focuses on how intelligently those interactions unfold. Shah’s mandate is to bridge these two worlds, the immersive and the intelligent, ensuring Meta leads the next era of human-technology symbiosis.
A future built on connection
For Vishal Shah, the journey from reimagining digital spaces to shaping personal intelligence represents both continuity and reinvention. His steady rise within Meta reflects a balance of vision and pragmatism of a leader equally at ease with technical depth and human empathy.
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As Meta continues its transformation, Vishal Shah’s leadership will likely define how billions experience AI not as a background algorithm but as a companion in daily life and a bridge between human creativity and machine intelligence. This appointment signals more than a professional leap that echoes Shah’s own words from few years earlier. “This isn’t about running from our past,” he said in an interview. “It’s about running toward a future — a future we’re really excited about.”
The Meta AI leader, originally from Gujarat, is a devoted family man and a father of two. He maintains a low personal profile, with most coverage focused on his professional achievements and strategic vision at Meta.
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