“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.”
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
it seems its your mind that cant change
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?
a platform for AI-based email automation
the built a ChatGPT wrapper like all the other revolutionary AI companies lol the world needs more automated spam!
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.
So business grinds to a halt? That’s crazy.
May a large object fall on him. Death is the only solution to these people.
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/
Claims Adjuster.
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…
A recent MIT report indicates that 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable returns on investment, highlighting significant challenges in successfully implementing AI in businesses
CEOs:
“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”?
Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.
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!”
- CEO of now defunct “Screen Door Subs Inc.”
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.- Stockton Rush (if he were alive today)
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.
The entire pressure vessel for the crew used five major components: two hemispherical titanium end caps, two matching titanium interface rings, and the 142 cm (56 in) internal diameter, 2.4-meter-long (7.9 ft) carbon fiber-wound cylindrical hull.[15] The forward hemispherical end cap could be detached from its interface ring, becoming a hatch that allowed crew members to enter the crew compartment before a mission, and exit at its conclusion.[3]
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.
Marketing people are known for beliving their own lies.
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!”
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.
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.
rather than focusing on what it could
When you’re driving a car down the ski jumping ramp.
I wonder how many employees are working on automating the CEO there first
From the article:
Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.
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.
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.
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
“They ruthlessly cut costs, R&D, and employee benefits and then replace existing employees with overseas contractors. Innovation and growth take a back seat to sheer profitability.”
This is the operating manual that explains why IgniteTech’s much-publicized AI purge feels more like a familiar private-equity play.
[…]
IgniteTech is owned by ESW. For anyone who’s watched the ESW orbit, that vagueness is not accidental. ESW’s playbook, summarized in a long explanatory dossier that has circulated inside the industry, is blunt: buy distressed software, strip costs, move work to an hourly contractor model through a unit like Crossover (which has been described in Forbes as a “global software sweatshop”), and squeeze recurring revenue out of an existing customer base rather than invest in new products.i was going to comment how this resembles PE firm tactics, thats probably his endgoal, and AI is just a convenient excuse.
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.
Its HOW pe FIRMS operate.
So they could have held paint drying Mondays instead, with the same overall effect
“Every single Monday was called Paint Dry Monday” Vaughan said, with his mandate for staff that they could only watch paint dry. “You couldn’t have customer calls; you couldn’t work on budgets; you had to only watch paint dry.” 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.”
Selling artificial intelligence to natural idiots.
Customers see it that way?
Depends who they define as “customers”, probably. The little people using the stuff aren’t customers, in their eyes.
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.
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.
Because AI is Actualy Indians :)
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?
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).
This is the relevant context to this puff-piece, this should be stickied right at the top.
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
