By Olivier Acuña Barba •
Published: 18 Aug 2025 • 23:11
• 2 minutes read
He’s Eric Boss of Ignite Tech, who one day took the difficult decision to replace 80% of his staff because they resisted AI | Credit: Ignited Tech
Eric Vaughan, CEO of enterprise-software powerhouse IgniteTech, said he does not regret firing 80 per cent of his staff within a year because they were not on board with his vision that generative AI was an “existential” transformation, according to an article on Fortune.
In 2023 and into the first quarter of 2024, Vaughan said IgniteTech replaced hundreds of employees. However, he refused to give the exact figure.
“That was not our goal,” he told Fortune. “It was extremely difficult. But changing minds was harder than adding skills.” It was, by any measure, a brutal reckoning—but Vaughan insists it was necessary, and told Fortune he would do it again. “In early 2023, we saw the light,” he said. “Now I’ve certainly morphed to believe that this is every company, and I mean that literally every company, is facing an existential threat by this transformation.” He said that at the time, he felt every tech company in the world was facing a key inflection point regarding the adoption of artificial intelligence.
Vaughan saw urgency
Where others saw promise, Vaughan saw urgency, said Fortune, because he genuinely believed that it was either adopt AI or collapse as a company, no matter the size. “We’re going to give a gift to each of you. And that gift is a tremendous investment of time, tools, education, and projects to give you a new skill,” he explained. The company began reimbursing for AI tools and prompt engineering classes, and even brought in outside experts to evangelise.
“Every single Monday was called ‘AI Monday,’” Vaughan said, with his mandate for staff that they could only work on AI. “You couldn’t have customer calls, you couldn’t work on budgets, you had to only work on AI projects.”
He said his mandate was across the board, from workers to sales, marketing, everybody at Ignite Tech. “That culture needed to be built. That was the key.” He invested heavily in mass learning, but it failed because of even greater employee resistance, even sabotage.
One in three sabotaged their companies
According to the 2025 enterprise AI adoption report by WRITER, an AI platform that helps enterprise clients with AI integration, one in three workers said they have “actively sabotaged” their company’s AI rollout. That number rises to four in ten with millennial and Gen Z employees.
Vaughan says he didn’t want to force anyone. “You can’t compel people to change, especially if they don’t believe.” He added that belief was the thing he needed to recruit for. Company leadership ultimately realised they’d have to launch a massive recruiting effort for what became known as “AI Innovation Specialists.”
In exchange for this complex transformation, IgniteTech reaped extraordinary results. By the end of 2024, the company had launched two patent-pending AI solutions, including a platform for AI-based email automation (Eloquens AI), with a radically rebuilt team.
In the end, it worked out for him
Financially, IgniteTech remained strong. Vaughan disclosed that the company, which he said is in the nine-figure revenue range, finished 2024 at “near 75 per cent EBITDA”, all while completing a major acquisition.
“You multiply people give people the ability to multiply themselves and do things at a pace,” he said, touting the company’s ability to build new customer-ready products in as little as four days—an unthinkable timeline in the old regime. For Vaughan, there’s no ambiguity. Would he do it again?
