CEO Eric Vaughan of IgniteTech, a dominant force in corporate software, is steadfast in his reflections on the most drastic choice he has made in his extensive career. Vaughan, who believed that generative AI would be a “existential” change, glanced at his team in early 2023 and observed that they were not quite on board. In the end, he completely destroyed the company, replacing about 80% of its staff in less than a year, according to Fortune’s analysis of headcount data.
Vaughan said IgniteTech replaced hundreds of workers during 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, but he would not say how many. That wasn’t their intention and It was really challenging. However, adding skills was easier than altering people’s beliefs. By all accounts, it was a harsh reality check, but Vaughan maintains that it was required and that he would do it again.
The writing on the wall was dramatic and obvious to Vaughan. “We saw the light in early 2023,” he said in an interview, adding that he thought all tech companies were at a pivotal juncture regarding the use of AI. He has now undoubtedly changed his mind to think that this transition poses an existential threat to every organization—by which he means that every company is affected.
Vaughan perceived urgency where others saw potential, fearing that even the most successful companies could fail if they don’t advance AI. He convened an all-hands meeting with his remote, international workforce. The cozy routines and quarterly targets were no longer there. Rather, his message was clear: AI will henceforth be the center of everything. We will provide everyone of you with a gift. He clarified, “And that gift is a tremendous investment of time, tools, education, projects … to give you a new skill.” The business even hired outside experts to spread the word and started paying for AI tools and prompt engineering seminars.
“Every single Monday was called ‘AI Monday,’. Vaughan stated that he had instructed his employees to focus solely on AI. “You had to work exclusively on AI projects; you couldn’t work on budgets or take customer calls.” He claimed that this affected everyone at IgniteTech, not just the tech staff, including the sales and marketing departments. “That culture has to be established. That—that was the key.
This was a significant expenditure, he continued, adding that 20% of payroll went for a mass-learning program that was unsuccessful due to widespread opposition, including sabotage. Vaughan found that belief is a difficult thing to produce. We did have opposition in those early days; it was blatant, “Yeah, I’m not going to do this.” Thus, we bid those folks farewell.
Why didn’t they get on board?
Vaughan was startled to see that technical workers, rather than marketing or sales, generally dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he added, expressing reservations about what the AI couldn’t accomplish rather than what it could. The marketers and salespeople were excited about the prospects of working with these new tools, he explained.
This friction is supported by broader research. According to the 2025 corporate AI adoption report by WRITER, an AI platform that specifically assists enterprise clients with AI integration, one in every three employees believe they’ve “actively sabotaged” their company’s AI rollout—a figure that rises to 41% among millennial and Gen Z employees. This can include refusing to use AI tools, purposely producing low-quality results, or skipping training entirely. Many people act out because they are concerned that AI may replace their professions, while others are annoyed by poor AI tools or leadership’s unclear plan.
WRITER’s Chief Strategy Officer, Kevin Chung, told Fortune that the “big eye-opening thing” from this poll was the human element of AI resistance. “The sabotage is not motivated by fear of technology… It’s more like there’s so much pressure to get it right, and then when you’re given something that doesn’t work, you become frustrated.” He went on to say that WRITER’s research reveals that employees frequently lack confidence in the direction of their firms. “When you’re given something that isn’t quite what you want, it’s incredibly aggravating, so sabotage steps in, because people say, ‘Okay, I’m going to run my own thing. “I’m going to figure it out myself.” You definitely don’t want this kind of “shadow IT” in your firm, he added.
Vaughan claims he did not intend to force anyone. “You can’t compel people to change, especially if they don’t believe.” He went on to say that belief was the most important thing to recruit for. Company officials eventually realized they needed to start a large recruiting push for what became known as “AI Innovation Specialists.” This applied everywhere, including sales, finance, and marketing. Vaughan described the situation within the organization as “really difficult” and “upside down.” We weren’t sure where we were or who we were yet.”
Thibault Bridel-Bertomeu, who later became IgniteTech’s chief AI officer, was one of a few important personnel who contributed. As a result, the business underwent a complete restructuring that Vaughan described as “somewhat unusual.” In essence, all divisions, regardless of domain, now report to the AI organization.
According to Vaughan, this centralization avoided duplication of effort and maximized knowledge sharing, which is a common problem in the adoption of AI. According to a survey by WRITER, 71% of C-suite executives at other companies claim that AI applications are being developed in silos, and nearly half say that their staff members are left to “figure generative AI out on their own.”
No pain, no gain?
IgniteTech received exceptional outcomes in return for this challenging transition. By the end of 2024, the company had a completely redesigned crew and two patent-pending AI technologies, including an AI-based email automation platform called Eloquens AI.
IgniteTech’s finances remained solid. While completing a significant acquisition, Khoros, Vaughan said that the company, which he claimed has nine-figure sales, ended 2024 at “near 75% EBITDA.” “You multiply people … give people the ability to multiply themselves and do things at a pace,” he added, highlighting the company’s four-day turnaround time for new, customer-ready items, which was unimaginable under the previous administration.
What does Vaughan’s story mean for others? On one level, it serves as a case study on the pain and benefits of radical change management. However, his merciless approach appears to solve many of the issues raised in the WRITER poll, including a lack of strategy and investment, misalignment between IT and business, and a failure to identify champions capable of unlocking AI’s benefits.
The ‘boy who cried wolf’ dilemma
To be sure, IgniteTech is not alone in dealing with these difficulties. Joshua Wöhle is the CEO of Mindstone, a company similar to WRITER that offers AI upskilling services to workforces, teaching hundreds of people each month at organizations such as Lufthansa, Hyatt, and NBA teams. In a recent appearance on BBC Business, he emphasized Vaughan’s two approaches: upskilling and mass replacement.
Wöhle contrasted the recent cases of Ikea and Klarna, suggesting that the former demonstrates why it is preferable to “reskill” existing staff. Klarna, a Swedish buy-now pay-later company, received a lot of attention for deciding to lay off some of its customer service representatives in order to transition to AI, only to rehire them for the same positions. “We’re getting close to the point when [AI] outperforms most humans in knowledge work. But this is exactly why augmentation outperforms automation,” Wöhle commented on LinkedIn.
A Klarna spokeswoman told that the business did not lay off staff, but rather implemented multiple ways to customer support, which is maintained by outsourced customer-service providers that are paid based on the volume of work done. According to Klarna, the introduction of an AI customer-service assistant lowered the workload by the equivalent of 700 full-time agents—from approximately 3,000 to 2,300—and allowed third-party suppliers to redeploy those 700 people to other clients. Now that the AI customer support representative is “handling more complex queries than when we launched,” Klarna says the number has dropped to 2,200. Klarna says its contractor has rehired only two workers in a pilot program aimed at combining highly trained human support professionals with AI to provide exceptional customer service.
In an interview, Wöhle stated that one of his clients was quite direct with his employees, telling them to commit all Fridays to AI retraining and inviting them to go if they did not report back on any of their work. He suggested it can be “kinder” to remove staff who are opposed to AI: “The pace of change is so fast that it’s the kinder thing to force people through it.” He stated that he used to believe that if he could get all employees to truly enjoy learning, Mindstone would be able to make a significant difference, but after teaching literally thousands of people, he learned that “most people detest learning. They would avoid it if possible.”
Wöhle blamed much of the AI resistance in the workforce on a “boy who cried wolf” problem in the tech sector, citing NFTs and blockchain as examples of technologies that were described as revolutionary but “didn’t have the real effect” that tech leaders claimed. “You can’t really blame them” for refusing, he explained. Most people “get stuck because they think from their work flow first,” he noted, and they believe AI is overhyped because they expect AI to fit into their old way of working. “It takes a lot more thinking and kind of prodding for you to change the way that you work,” but once you do, you notice tremendous increases. A human cannot maintain five call transcripts in their head while attempting to submit a proposal to a client, he claims, but AI can.
When asked for response, Ikea repeated Wöhle, stating that their “people-first AI approach focuses on augmentation, not automation.” According to a spokeswoman, Ikea is employing AI to automate processes rather than jobs, freeing up time for more valuable, human-centric work.
According to the WRITER research, organizations with defined AI plans are considerably more likely to succeed, and those that spend heavily in AI outperform their competitors by a significant margin. However, as Vaughan’s experience demonstrates, investing without belief and buy-in can result in wasted energy. “The culture has to be built. Ultimately, we had to go out and recruit and hire people who shared our beliefs. “Changing minds was more difficult than adding skills.”
Vaughan sees no ambiguity. Would he try it again? He doesn’t hesitate: he’d rather go through months of suffering and rebuild a new, AI-driven basis from the ground up than allow an organization to fade away. “This isn’t a technological change. It’s a cultural and business transformation.” He stated that he does not advocate that others follow his approach and replace 80% of their employees. “I absolutely do not suggest that. That wasn’t our objective. “It was incredibly challenging. But, at the end of the day, he said, everyone needs to be in the same boat, rowing in the same direction. Otherwise, “We don’t get where we’re going.”
