{"id":74259,"date":"2026-06-15T12:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T12:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/74259\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T12:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T12:44:09","slug":"this-tech-ceo-fired-80-of-his-workforce-over-ai-resistance-heres-what-hes-learned-since-then","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/74259\/","title":{"rendered":"This tech CEO fired 80% of his workforce over AI resistance. Here\u2019s what he\u2019s learned since then"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most companies think they have an AI adoption problem. They don\u2019t. They have an unlearning problem, according to Deloitte<\/a> vice chair China Widener.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I said to you, \u2018Everything you know about making spaghetti, I need you to let go of,\u2019 you would look at me like I was stupid,\u201d she said. \u201cWe aren\u2019t talking about things that didn\u2019t work. We are asking people to let go of things they have done every day for five or 10 or 20 years that worked, and we\u2019re asking them to stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

For AI adoption to succeed, employees must unlearn, relearn, and learn simultaneously, Widener told me at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech<\/a> conference last week. That\u2019s easier said than done, especially when organizations are devoting far more resources to AI tools than to helping employees adapt to them.<\/p>\n

Widener cited a Deloitte study<\/a> showing that executives spend 93% of their AI budget on technology and only 7% on workforce adoption.<\/p>\n

Eric Vaughan, CEO of enterprise-software company IgniteTech, sees the problem differently. He argued that the issue isn\u2019t the tech spend or a skills gap\u2014it\u2019s employee resistance.<\/p>\n

Vaughan said he laid off roughly 80%<\/a> of his employees because they refused to embrace AI despite a year of training. \u201cWe took 20% of our entire payroll for one day a week for an entire quarter to get people to learn AI and still found people that said, \u2018I\u2019m not going to do it,\u2019\u201d he shared at the conference. \u201cSo we had to replace them, and if I were to do it over again, I would have started with that first.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether the obstacle is unlearning or outright resistance, both leaders agree on one point: AI adoption is ultimately a cultural challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf your team isn\u2019t in sync with you, or doesn\u2019t believe in the mission,\u201d said Vaughan, \u201cI don\u2019t think any amount of training or skills or strategy is going to fix that problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Around the Table<\/p>\n

A round-up of the most important HR headlines.<\/p>\n

Recruiters are leaning into \u201cbackdoor\u201d references to counter AI hiring slop. Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/p>\n

Anthopic\u2019s CEO boasts only one direct report, at a time where other leaders are growing who they manage. Bloomberg<\/a><\/p>\n

Employers are rewriting job postings with language meant to attract women. Financial Times<\/a><\/p>\n

Watercooler<\/p>\n

Everything you need to know from Fortune.<\/p>\n

Generation grumbles. A Gen Z hiring manager says boomer bosses are right about her generation\u2019s attitude problem after one problematic interview<\/a>. \u2014Orianna Rosa Royle<\/p>\n

Trade investment. Meta commits $115 million to solve the skilled-trades shortage with a training program and guaranteed job<\/a> upon completion. \u2014Jacqueline Munis<\/p>\n

Candidate qualities. The architect behind Claude Code says these are the three<\/a> things Anthropic looks for in a good hire. \u2014Emma Burleigh<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most companies think they have an AI adoption problem. They don\u2019t. They have an unlearning problem, according to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,405,25,24587,25853,3836,324,685,2821],"class_list":["post-74259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-brainstorm-tech","tag-corporate-culture","tag-fortune-workplace-innovation","tag-hiring","tag-leadership","tag-the-future-of-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}