Meta to Phase Out Workplace Over Next 2 Years

Meta Platforms will be phasing out Workplace, its office collaboration tool, over the next two years.

The platform will continue working as usual until Aug. 31, 2025, when it will stop functioning, and users will be able to view and download their data until May 31, 2026, according to an email the company sent to PYMNTS.

“We are discontinuing Workplace from Meta so we can focus on building AI and metaverse technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape the way we work,” a Meta spokesperson said in the email. “Over the next two years, we will provide our Workplace customers the option to transition to Zoom’s Workvivo product, Meta’s only preferred migration partner.”

Workplace was designed for work interactions and aimed to compete with Slack and other workplace productivity tools, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (May 14).

The office collaboration tool was launched at the end of 2016. It aimed to gain market share in the office collaboration space at a time when — though Facebook had long set its sights on the business market — its product offerings resonated more with consumers.

Meta reported in a May 2021 blog post that Workplace had 7 million subscribers at that time, a figure that was up more than 40% from a year earlier.

The company said at the time that with the continuing prevalence of remote work, many employers were looking to create employee-centered positive experiences, regardless of where people work and live.

“Business leaders are acknowledging that truly connecting with people in remote or hybrid working environments is business-critical,” Meta said in the post. “We believe this growth is an indicator that more companies are thinking about how to build communities at work.”

During Meta’s most recent earnings call, which was held April 24, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse were front and center.

“We’re building a number of different AI services, from our AI assistant to augmented reality apps and glasses, to APIs [application programming interfaces] that help creators engage their communities and that fans can interact with, to business APIs that we think every business eventually on our platform will use.”