Imagine showing up to work one morning and realising that, within the next twelve months, eight out of every ten of your colleagues will be gone. Not because the company is failing. Not because of a recession. But because they refused to change how they worked.
That is more or less what happened at IgniteTech.
Eric Vaughan, the company's CEO, made a decision that most executives quietly fantasise about and publicly claim they would never make: he mandated that his team move to AI-first ways of working, and when a significant portion of his staff pushed back, he replaced them. Nearly 80% of his workforce turned over within a year. Asked whether he regretted it, Vaughan told Fortune the answer was simple. "AI adoption was not optional," he said. "This is not a tech change. It is a cultural change."
That quote landed with a thud when it first circulated — and it is making the rounds again this week, this time alongside fresh data that puts the whole story in a new, more troubling light. It turns out Vaughan's situation was not an anomaly. It was a warning. And a significant slice of the workforce is currently walking straight toward the same cliff, seemingly unaware of how close they are to the edge.
