Eric VaughanCEO of enterprise software giant Ignite TechnologyHe stands firm as he reflects on the most radical decision of his decades-long career. In early 2023, convinced that generative AI was an “existential” transformation, Vaughan looked at his team and discovered that the workforce wasn’t fully committed yet. His final response: He tore the company apart and replaced nearly 80% of its employees Within a year, according to employee headcount data reviewed wealth.
Vaughn said that from 2023 to the first quarter of 2024 wealthSince then, IgniteTech has replaced hundreds of employees, but declined to disclose specific numbers. “That’s not our goal,” he told wealth. “It’s very difficult… but it’s harder to change your mind than to add skills.” It was a brutal reckoning by any measure, but Vaughan insisted it was necessary and said he would do it again.
For Vaughn, the writing was clear and dramatic.
“At the beginning of 2023, we saw the light,” he said wealth In an August 2025 interview, he added that he believed every tech company was facing a critical inflection point in AI adoption. “Now I’ve certainly come to believe that this is every company, I mean literally every company faces an existential threat from this shift.”
Where others see hope, Vaughan sees urgency—he believes that if progress in artificial intelligence is not made, even the strongest businesses may be doomed. he held a plenary meeting with his global remote team. Gone are the comfortable routines and quarterly goals. Instead, his message was straightforward: Everything will now revolve around artificial intelligence. “We are giving each of you a gift. This gift is a tremendous investment of time, tools, education, projects… to give you new skills,” he explained. The company began reimbursing the cost of AI tools and fast-track engineering courses, and even hired outside experts to spread the word.
“Every Monday is called ‘AI Monday,'” said Vaughn, who requires employees to only work on artificial intelligence. “You can’t take customer calls; you can’t work on budget; you can only work on AI projects.” This happens on all fronts, he said, not just for technologists but also for sales, marketing and others at IgniteTech. “That culture needs to be built. That’s key.”
It was a significant investment, he added: 20% of wages were earmarked for a large-scale learning program that failed due to massive resistance and even sabotage. Faith, Vaughn discovered, is a hard thing to create.
“Early on, we did run into pushback, and we were met with outright, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to do that,'” he said. “So we said goodbye to those people.”
Resistance: White-collar resistance
Vaughn was surprised to find that it was often the technical people who persisted, not the marketing or sales people. They are the “most resistant,” he said, expressing various concerns about what AI can’t do rather than focusing on what it can do. He added that marketing and sales staff are excited about the possibilities of using these new tools.
This friction has been confirmed by wider research. According to 2025 Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Adoption Report go through writerOn an agent AI platform for enterprises, a third of employees said they were “actively sabotaging” their company’s AI rollout — a number that jumped to 41% among Millennial and Gen Z employees. This can take the form of refusing to use AI tools, deliberately generating low-quality output, or avoiding training altogether. Many are taking action out of fear that AI will replace their jobs, while others are frustrated by mediocre AI tools or unclear leadership strategies.
Writer Chief Strategy Officer Kevin Chung Tell wealth The “eye-opening thing” from the survey was the human element of AI resistance.
“This disruption is not because they are afraid of the technology,” he said. “It’s more like there’s a lot of pressure to get it right, and then you get frustrated when you get something that doesn’t work.”
He added that the authors’ research shows that employees often don’t believe in the direction of their organizations.
“When you get something that’s not exactly what you wanted, you get very frustrated, so sabotage starts because people say, ‘Well, I’m going to do this myself. I’m going to figure this out myself.'” You definitely don’t want this kind of “shadow IT” in your organization, he adds.
Vaughn said he doesn’t want to force anyone.
“You can’t force people to change, especially if they don’t believe it,” he said, adding that belief is indeed what he needs to recruit.
Company leaders eventually realized they had to launch a massive recruiting effort for so-called “artificial intelligence innovation experts.” This applies to everything: sales, finance, marketing, and others. Vaughn said this time was “really difficult” because things inside the company were “upside down… We didn’t quite know where we were or who we were.”
A few key hires helped, starting with the man who became IgniteTech’s chief artificial intelligence officer, Thibaut Bridle Bertomeu. That resulted in a sweeping reorganization of the company that Vaughan described as “somewhat unusual.” Essentially, every department reports to the AI organization, regardless of its domain.
Vaughan said this centralization avoids duplication of effort and maximizes knowledge sharing — a common problem in AI adoption. According to Writer’s survey, 71% of executives at other companies said AI applications are created in silos, and nearly half said their employees can only “work on generative AI on their own.”
No pain, no gain?
This difficult transformation resulted in IgniteTech achieving extraordinary results. By the end of 2024, the company had launched two patent-pending AI solutions, including its AI-based email automation platform (Eloquens AI), and completely rebuilt its team.
IgniteTech’s financial position remains strong. Vaughan revealed that the company has revenue in the nine-figure range and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) of nearly 75% in 2024, while also completing a major acquisition. Koros.
“You can multiply people…give people the ability to multiply themselves and do things at a certain pace,” he said, praising the company’s ability to build new products that are available to customers in just four days, a time that would have been unimaginable under the old system. In the months since, Vaughn told wealth In a statement in early 2026, the company will only continue to increase its headcount, recruiting AI innovation experts globally across functions, from marketing to sales to finance to engineering to support.
What does Vaughn’s story mean to others? In a way, this is a case study in the pain and rewards of radical change management. But his ruthless approach arguably solves many of the challenges identified in the Writer survey: a lack of strategy and investment, misalignment between IT and the business, and a failure to attract champions who can unlock the benefits of AI.
The “Boy Who Cried Wolf” Question
To be sure, IgniteTech isn’t the only company grappling with these challenges. Joshua Waller Mindstone is the CEO of Mindstone, a company that provides artificial intelligence upskilling services to employees and trains hundreds of employees every month for companies such as Lufthansa, Hyatt Hotels, and NBA teams. He discussed the two approaches Vaughn described in a recent appearance — upskilling and mass substitution. BBC Finance Today.
Waller contrasted recent examples from IKEA and Klarna, arguing that the former’s example illustrates why it’s best to “retrain” existing employees. Klarna, a Swedish buy-now-pay-later company, has received widespread attention for its decision to reduce its customer support staff in favor of artificial intelligence, but here’s the result: Rehire for the same role.
“We are approaching a stage where[artificial intelligence]is smarter than most people doing knowledge work. But this is exactly why augmentation beats automation,” Wöhle writes. LinkedIn.
A Klarna representative told wealth Instead of laying off employees, the company has adopted a multi-faceted approach to customer service, managed by outsourced customer service providers and paid based on the amount of work required. Klarna said the rollout of AI customer service assistants reduced the workload of the equivalent of 700 full-time customer service staff, from about 3,000 to 2,300, with third-party providers redeploying those 700 staff to other customers. That number has dropped to 2,200 now that AI customer service agents are “handling more complex queries than when we launched,” Klarna said. Klarna said its contractors have rehired just two people in a pilot scheme designed to combine highly trained human support staff with artificial intelligence to deliver outstanding customer service.
during an interview wealthWaller said one of his clients was very vocal with employees, asking them to spend an entire Friday on AI retraining, and if they didn’t report any work, they were invited to leave the company.
He said it might be “kinder” to fire workers who resist AI: “The pace of change is so fast that it would be kinder to force people to embrace it.” He added that he once thought it could help Mindstone make a real difference if all employees had a true love of learning, but after training thousands of employees, he found that “most people hate learning. If they can, they will avoid learning.”
Wöhle attributes much of the resistance to AI in the workforce to the tech industry’s “crying wolf” problem, noting that NFTs and blockchain have been called revolutionary technologies but “have not produced the real effects promised by technology leaders.”
“You can’t really blame them” for the boycott, he said. He added that most people “get stuck because they think in terms of workflow first,” and they think AI is overhyped because they want it to adapt to their old ways of working. “It takes more thinking and more motivation to change the way you work,” but once you do, you’ll see dramatic growth. He said that when you are trying to write a proposal to a client, it is impossible for a human to keep a record of five calls in his head, but artificial intelligence can.
When contacted for comment, Ikea echoed Waller’s statement, saying its “human-centered approach to AI focuses on augmentation, not automation.” A spokesperson said Ikea is using AI to automate tasks, not work, freeing up time for value-added, human-centered work.
Writer’s report notes that companies with a formal AI strategy are far more likely to succeed, and those investing heavily in AI far outperform their peers. But Vaughan’s experience shows that investing without conviction and support can be a waste of energy. “Culture needs to be built. Ultimately, we have to go out and recruit and hire people who already think the same way. Changing ideas is harder than adding skills.”
From an early 2026 perspective, Vaughan said in a statement wealthMonthly all-hands meetings look completely different than they did in the past: “We’ve done away with the format of reviewing goals and metrics. Now teams demo what they’ve built.” He wanted to emphasize another thing: Despite his drastic reorganization, he still didn’t feel like he was on top.
“We just haven’t been run over from behind yet,” he said. “The pace of change in AI is relentless. If we don’t keep pushing and learning every day, we’re going to be screwed.”
For Vaughan, there’s no ambiguity. Would he do it again? He didn’t hesitate: He would rather endure months of pain and build a new, AI-powered foundation from scratch than let an organization become irrelevant.
“This is not a technology change. This is a cultural change and it is a business change,” he said, adding that he did not recommend that others follow his lead and replace 80 percent of their employees.
“I wouldn’t recommend it at all,” he said. “That’s not our goal. It’s very difficult.”
But at the end of the day, he added, everyone has to be in the same boat and rowing in the same direction. Otherwise, “we won’t get to our destination.”
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on August 17, 2025.