This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again
“Every single Monday was called ‘AI Monday,’” Vaughan said, with his mandate for staff that they could work only on AI. “You couldn’t have customer calls; you couldn’t work on budgets; you had to only work on AI projects.” He said this happened across the board, not just for tech workers, but also for sales, marketing, and everybody else at IgniteTech. “That culture needed to be built. That was the key.”
https://fortune.com/article/ceo-laid-off-80-percent-workforce-sabotage-what-are-ai-skills/Open linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com470
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Yeah this is called AI washing. Basically firing people, outsourcing all the jobs, stripping a company till there is nothing left. The goal is to maximize profits till the company is basically dead and then sell the husk. Because it's done under the AI label, customers and other interested parties see it as being innovative and not just money grabbing.
Selling artificial intelligence to natural idiots.
So they could have held paint drying Mondays instead, with the same overall effect
Customers see it that way?
Depends who they define as “customers”, probably. The little people using the stuff aren’t customers, in their eyes.
Its HOW pe FIRMS operate.
Private Equity is finding it increasingly difficult to offload the companies they have taken over.
With some luck, this dickhead will go broke.
i think whatever entities likely bought out these "bankrupted" companies arnt doing anymore, or trusting the PE firms.
Very interesting. I appreciate the additional information. Saying its for AI but moving it to overseas contractors instead of actually moving it to AI that is actually overseas contractors (like that one AI company that was outed as being 700 Indian developers) is honestly kinda funny. AI is enshittification given form, I suppose.
Because AI is Actualy Indians :)
I mean they have added a chatbot to their website and I'm sure they have replaced overseas first line support in many products with chatbots as well to encourage their customers to give up on getting support (and ensure that the customers that prevails and get sent to a human coworker are sufficiently pissed off).
The AI part is that the drug riddled CEO asked AI leading questions. The AI wholeheartedly agreed the company should speed run late stage capitalism. What more confirmation is needed that AI is the future?
and The indians ones might not be as good as the one in the states, so they are getting a much lower quality of product overall.
This is the relevant context to this puff-piece, this should be stickied right at the top.
i was going to comment how this resembles PE firm tactics, thats probably his endgoal, and AI is just a convenient excuse.
So the people that had an actual idea of what the implications of using it might be weren't on board? Huh. Weird.
"All the engineers said my "screen door on a submarine" was "stupid" and would "sink the ship", so I fired them and hired new engineers!"
speaking of submarines, this is the exact line of thinking that turned an idiot CEO into a paste at the bottom of the ocean
thank you mighty wizard for casting dopamine.
I can not read the word "cast" in any form without remembering this:
There's a small difference, the imploded CEO was "boldly going where no man had gone before, on such an accelerated timetable and tight budget" - the screen door guy was a couple of orders of magnitude more foolish.
I told AI to build me a submarine out of
titaniumcarbon fiber.Titanic sub was made from carbon fiber. Titanium is what he should have used.
Damnit, I knew that too. I stopped skimming too early in the Wiki paragraph.
build me a submarine out of cheese! I always get hungry when i'm submarining and not! anymore!
Wallace & Gromit Visit the Titanic.
No worries, friend. Good on you for making sure.
Like the guy with the carbon fiber submarine. Every engineer told him it couldn't be done, so he kept firing them until he had a staff of young, inexperienced engineers who would do what they were told, and just collect their paychecks.
Now their boss is dead, and there are no more paychecks.
Well at least that problem fixed itself.
I wished more of society's problems were solved that way, with the guy responsible for such a stupid concept paying the ultimate price for his arrogance.
Sales and marketing is often mostly bullshitting anyway. It also has a lot less risk and constraints associated to generated text having issues. Not surprised they were more on board. The tool is more fitting for those use cases anyway.
They’re also the people who build their career on never stirring the pot so they can make their clients feel special. They’re built to be sycophants and their jobs are, and this isn’t even necessarily a bad thing, a little more nebulous which means they’d feel the effects much less strongly.
"Pointlessly waffling for a living just got so much easier!"
Marketing people are known for beliving their own lies.
Seeing these kinds of people harness AI is so embarrassing. They feel empowered while doing some of the whackest stuff. In the end, it is still technical style work snd they are still awful at it.
When you're driving a car down the ski jumping ramp.
“When I do it, it will be different.
OpenAI marketing > MIT analysis, apparently
My question: what percentage of those failures to deliver were led by people who had no idea what they were doing and expected AI to "do it for them"?
Because it had nothing to do with AI
It was an excuse to slash the workforce with relatively little backlash.
and that's how he achieved 75% profit margin. Let's see him do that twice.
surprised he didn't golden parachute out and reload with another company/
Not hard to fire everyone and net a profit, once.
Did AI build that dogshit website of theirs too?
Wtf it just opened a video in full screen on iOS right away. When I closed it and wanted to scroll down I was suddenly dragging an icon. When tapping this icon it opens some „my personas“ dialog which I don’t even understand what it is supposed to be? What even is this shit ass site?
Edit: page title is „Home V2“ lol
Edit 2: Of course this site is made using Elementor, hence the bad performance and buggy layout.
That's actually somewhat of a Safari bug.
Safari has this tendency of opening videos in full screen, if the video is natively embedded (not using a third party video player component), is set to auto play, and isn't flagged specifically for not opening automatically in full screen (this is a Safari specific flag that no other browser requires as no other browser has this stupid default behaviour).
Definitely not great behavior but considering Safari makes up a bunch of their users, they should have really added the playsinline attribute to the video to prevent this. But since this site is made using a pretty crappy site builder, they probably cannot change this until Elementor fixes this bug.
Does it load exceptionally slow for you too?
https://ignitetech.ai/ it has to be like purposely bad I vibe code internal frontends and ive never had something look this bad
That website is really shit even by the low standards of most modern websites.
Looks ok without any JS.
looks best without a browser at all.
let me spell it out for you: Why would I want to look at his website at all?
Got it, sorry.
Nota bene: Not just laid off, replaced. With other people.
Basically spent a ton of money and talent and business disruption to turn over 80% of his workforce for shits and gigs.
that 80% adds profit to his pockets. thats whats hes really saying.
So Mondays are days off?
Where can I sign up
Probably overhired just after COVID like everyone else in the tech sector and then realized he had no idea what to do with all the extra people because he never really had a plan.
COVID excuse not required. CEOs overhiring is like birds flying south for the winter, the sun rising in the east, water being wet - it's just what they do. 80% is a bit extreme, but he had the AI excuse, so...
Eh I've only been in the software industry for 6 years and change. The post-covid hiring boom was for me the first time I'd seen it done en masse and then the subsequent layoffs were the first time I'd seen that en masse, but neither affected me personally luckily.
I have no idea what was going on before that because I had no real reason to care, nobody wanted to hire me anyway before I got my first job in the industry lol
It's not just the software industry. Fully 1/2 of CEOs I have worked under get their hands on some money and an idea that they're going to grow the business - really fast - poised for growth - ready to capitalize on the opportunities when they arise - and 6-18 months later their idea doesn't pan out and they've got all these people who are costing more than the company is bringing in in sales revenue, so...
Ignitetech or Initech
ineptech
InSpiteTech
InnerChoad
ignitiontech, where they ignited thier own company to the ground.
The question I put to management is "What do you want me to use AI for?"
I can't get a consistent answer. Lots of stuff unrelated to my job duties. "Well, it's so easy to make Facebook ads!" - "You know that's not a thing I do, right?"
They don't have an answer because they don't know either. They've bought into the idea, and invested trillions, and now they're all hoping to just churn the cream until it turns into something else, but they have no idea what it will be, or how to use it.
They're just hoping some minion finally figures out a profitable model, so they can claim it as their own, give him a nominal raise and a nice office, and they can go make trillions off his idea.
Yeah, my boss told he's under pressure from upper management and customers to add AI in our app. His answer is always "to do what?". So far, nobody has provided an answer, but whenever we get one we'll be happy to implement it.
CUSTOMERS=other ceos, and c-suites
A company so small it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. No discernible products.
Any poly market bets on how long this company actually lasts?
Their website barely even works it honestly looks like a scam organisation. I can't find any description of what it is that they actually do which makes me believe that they don't do anything.
the built a ChatGPT wrapper like all the other revolutionary AI companies lol the world needs more automated spam!
If this dickhead is so smart, why does he even need a staff? I’m sure he can go start a company all by himself with just AI to work for him.
I assume that's the goal he's aiming for. Wonder who will buy his stuff when it's just CEOs and their AI still employed.
That will never happen unless CEOs can actually explain what they want.
What the fuck is IgniteTech?
An "enterprise-software powerhouse", allegedly. Basically they bought an AI startup and decided that this was their entire personality now.
Yeah looking it over it looks like they're a tech accusation company. Basically they buy flailing or nearly failed companies suck anything out of them they can and then sell them. They probably purchased an AI company like you're saying decided to go all in on it while purchasing and selling other companies as well. Having anything AI related right now bring big bucks when it comes to funding.
Exactly
He REALLY hates paying employees and wants their pennies in his treasure horde, we get it.
He will be shocked when he discovers the shareholders don't want to pay him, either. He'll be like "what?!?! AI doing MY job? This is a travesty!" and then they will have robot security drag him out of the building screaming.
This is a paid promotion. Its one of the ones you pay an extra $1000 and they hide the sponsored tag.
Native advertising for the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising
John Oliver has a good bit on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc
This reads like a very weird AI circlejerk. They repeatedly mention that AI is the solution every company should adopt, but fail to provide a single example of succesful application. And I mean a how not a reult. They say 'company X KPI are this % better thanks to AI', but not how they applied it. Just talk of AI mindset, and 'culture' but I would have liked to understand what exactly it was used for (like agents, chatbots, automation of something in particular). It just reads like a lot of patting in the back and hot air so far, which is a pity because I would be interested in reading about real life cases of successful AI implementaiom
I used to joke that the CEO of my former employer must subscribe to some magazine called "CEO Weekly" in which they must periodically mention, in a similar "no examples of usage, just KPIs" manner, webchat. She would always forget about it promptly and then random number of weeks later bug my boss again.
I told him if they want me to come up with how they can use webchat and be their solutions designer they need to double my salary. $60k USD was not enough for being a tier 3 systems admin, a fax and telephony specialist, and figuring out their use cases for them just to check a box that says "we have it!"
They asked an LLM for the KPIs and it helpfully made up the figures they wanted to see.
Which became a self fulfilling prophecy once they showed those awesome “results” to the investors.
Of course it'll all come crashing down once the investors ask for a return on their investment and there are no more new investors to support the pyramid, but by that point someone (probably not the brainrotten CEOs, who are drinking their own coolaid) will be far away with the money in a Cayman Islands bank account...
"I am bad at managing my finances, and eventually need to get bailed out by the government, or end up next to the homeless guy I used to make fun of".
Incredibly punchable face
"Like, I'm not gonna be able to replace these losers if they don't fix this piece of shit tech for me, will I?"
I wonder how many employees are working on automating the CEO there first
From the article:
Not surprising the people with technical skills that aren’t actually replaceable by LLMs would be against forced AI adoption. Good luck maintaining a code base created with vibe coding. Meanwhile the CEO probably looks at ChatGPT and realizes it could basically do everything he already does (write emails and make high level decisions without actually having to worry about their implementation) and then incorrectly thinks it’s the case for everyone else.
I deal with this at work. Two engineers love AI, myself and the other engineer hate it. We're mechanical. It's funny when a material standard doesn't exist...
Prediction markets have outperformed CEOs for decades and still haven't replaced them, for the same reason WfH hasn't replaced offices. Everything is a monopoly or oligopoly now, with no need to efficiently maximize profits. It's entirely a matter of control.
that writer's name is all you need to know. always look at the writer's name and their previous work to identify industry shills
Previously I added to my routine, to ask two stupid queries of ai every day, because that was the metric we were judged on. I can get that out of the way quickly, and get to my work.
Now we have to use a new ai tool that has a lot more telemetry, thanks Microsoft. Unfortunately I don’t know what metric they are using and the tool spies on everything. I can’t even just not use the ai features because the tool is horrible
The basic stats I can see are the prompt count, number of active days, and last active date. By default reports are anonymised but that can be turned off by the admin.
Iirc paid licenses let you do data purview searches on prompts. But I can't see that in my one as we only use the basic.
Use it as a dumb worklog sometimes. Tell it what you were already gonna do and ask if it would do the same. It's almost always gonna agree. Then just ignore it. If somebody AI obsessed pulls out the full logs they're gonna see you're doing what the AI said was good. (basically Inception, lol)
He can have AI replace him too.
That's a low bar.
When all of this is over, if this ever ends, I want psychologists to study this AI obsession CEOs have now. I want to see how they can look at AI and insist that everyone be forced to use something that hinders them rather than help.
Greed and lack of empathy?
Board/shareholders want company to do AI because everyone is doing AI so you can't possibly be maxing shareholder value without doing enough AI
CEO has to be able to show metrics about everyone doing AI
????
Not profit, that's for sure, everyone downstream from the CEO suffers, long term profitability is hindered, but at least while the bubble is still ongoing, share prices are temporarily higher because AI
I heard someone mention that AI sycophathy is a result of renforcement learning techniques used (people rated honeyed words higher, no shock really).
People with big egos tend to like sycophants because they reenforce their narratives they have about themselves. Big egos also tend to take up the majority of cheif type roles, either because privlidge gives advantages to both and some because a big ego makes risks seem smaller them.
Its like we made the perfect machine to suck money from them. The sleezyst sales person with no ego. Just endless text telling you what you want to belive.
There is so much science to be done once the madness is over.
It is never the technology at fault. When it comes down to it, evil people want to exercise the power of their crown, damned be the consequences and injustice.
AI is just the latest excuse to be a remorseless dickhead.
This fortune editor used a clickbait title, 2 years later says he'd do it again
May a large object fall on him. Death is the only solution to these people.
so they had to sell to ai customers? what an idiot
If this guy is such a genius why doesn't he tell us what exactly AI is for and whether it is beneficial to society at large?
So business grinds to a halt? That's crazy.
it seems its your mind that cant change
I hope his schmeckel no longer works.
Claims Adjuster.