Eric Vaughan, CEO of $26 million software firm IgniteTech, culled roughly 80 percent of the workforce largely because many employees resisted a rapid AI push rather than to directly automate roles. After early 2023 developments like ChatGPT, Vaughan called the technology "an existential threat" and instituted initiatives such as "AI Mondays" to accelerate internal AI development. Widespread employee pushback, especially from technical staff who saw AI limitations, prompted mass replacements. Vaughan characterized resistance as sabotage and dismissed dissenting workers. Analysts warn that forcing employees into AI-oversight roles can produce alienation and worsen stress amid large-scale layoffs.
When it comes to AI, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more groveling cheerleader than the humble CEO. As hype around the software grows, business execs have become astonishingly comfortable sharing their hopes that AI will soon make human labor a thing of the past. Now, even as Wall Street begins to reckon with the empty promises of AI automation, one CEO is bragging about laying off almost all of his workforce in the face of the tech - a move he says he would make again.
Recent reporting by detailed the mind-boggling strategy deployed by Eric Vaughan, CEO of a$26 million software firm called IgniteTech, which involved culling 80 percent of its staff - not to automate their roles, strikingly, but because they didn't share his enthusiasm for AI. Mere months after the first ChatGPT model hit the world in early 2023 - a technology the CEO called "an existential threat" - Vaughan started making an AI push throughout the company.
As employees became increasingly hostile to company initiatives like "AI Mondays" - a day dedicated to building the company's AI system, regardless of a worker's department - he was soon replacing hundreds of employees. "In those early days, we did get resistance, we got flat-out, 'Yeah, I'm not going to do this' resistance," Vaughan told Fortune. "And so we said goodbye to those people."
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