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 Fortune 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.”
The most pushback, the CEO told the publication, wasn’t from staffers in roles like marketing or sales, but from tech workers who understood the limitations of the AI being crammed down their throats. It’s not hard to see why — analysts argue that when workers are reduced to shepherding AI systems around, they feel alienated from the meaning of their jobs.
That sense of alienation becomes even more pervasive when mass rounds of layoffs and replacements add to the stress workers feel in an already turbulent economy.
Worker pushback, which Vaughan likened to “mass resistance, even sabotage,” prevented the IgniteTech’s first AI scheme. After culling those who dared to use what little power they had as workers to alter the direction of the company, Vaughan had his way.
Soon, every division was reporting to IgniteTech’s newly hired “chief AI officer,” Thibault Bridel-Bertomeu, a sort of centralized bureaucracy with AI firmly at the core.
Though profits have reportedly increased since IgniteTech’s executives began their draconian campaign, they do so at the obvious expense of hundreds of experienced workers who now face one of the toughest job markets in recent memory.
Hellbound and Down 