An advertising campaign urging people to stop hiring humans which went viral in San Francisco has hit London.
Tech figures on their way to work and the SXSW London event expressed outrage at the ads from Silicon Valley-based AI employee startup Artisan AI.
One ad in Old Street Station read: ‘Stop hiring humans. Artisans don’t spend half of the year on holiday. Artisans don’t ‘WFH’ from Ibiza.’
The firm was founded by British entrepreneur Jaspar Carmichael-Jack in 2023 with Dr Rupert Dodkins, who has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Oxford. Dr Dodkins left the company in May 2024.
Artisan AI, which participated in the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator programme, recently announced $25m in Series A funding to add to the $21.1m it raised previously.
The firm is developing ‘Artisans’. These are described as human-like digital workers which automate job workflows from end to end and act as additions to teams, rather than software tools for them to use.
Carmichael-Jack told BusinessCloud in an interview in late 2023 that this makes them notably distinct from existing solutions, which require constant management from a human.
Vasco Vaz Rodrigues, head of growth at Trudenty – behind a privacy-preserving data sharing solution for first-party fraud prevention – said the ads at Old Street Station “left me restless”.
“What in the Black Mirror episode is this?” he asked in a LinkedIn post. “How tone deaf is this campaign when people are already struggling so much?
“AI is set to change everything, including the job market, and especially with entry level jobs. The world can’t ignore this. But that shouldn’t be the mission. This is not why we are building AI… I thought?
“Funnily enough, this week I’ve been searching for an automation tool for outbound. One that will empower our team as we grow. That tool won’t be Artisan. This is not the vision I want to support.”
Andrew Tindall, senior vice president – global partnerships at System1, added: “Stop hiring humans, hire AI instead? The most tone death (sic: deaf) ad I’ve seen.
“Perfectly finished off with a human that looks like they’ve lost the will to live blankly staring at you.”
The ads promote the firm’s first Artisan, Ava, a digital sales representative who is described by it as “an AI BDR (business development rep) on steroids… she’s available to hire now”.
Other messages from the previous billboard campaign in San Francisco included: ‘Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance’; ‘Artisans won’t come into work hungover’; ‘Artisans are excited to work 70+ hours a week’; ‘the era of AI employees is here’; ‘hire Artisans, not humans’; and ‘Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today’.
The campaign saw 50m online impressions. Artisan said recently that Ava is now used by 300+ organisations, with millions of recurring revenue quickly accrued as a result.
It also saw the company receive hundreds of death threats and hate mail, but Carmichael-Jack (below) said that the campaign was meant to grab attention – not undermine human workers – as he backtracked on his earlier message.
Back in London, Abid Tejani, senior account executive at Primetag, wrote: “Artisan AI’s ‘Stop Hiring Humans’ campaign isn’t just going viral – it’s triggering.
“In a sea of generic AI messaging, Artisan chose confrontation. They called out the thing most people are scared of… being replaced by AI bots.
“The backlash has been immediate: death threats, hate mail, and media outrage. But it worked.
“The result? Over 1 billion impressions. $2M+ in new ARR. Brand recognition surged from 5% to 70% in San Francisco.
“This wasn’t just marketing, it was emotional manipulation at scale. The brands that win don’t sell the best product.
“They make you feel something – love, fear, anger, awe. In a world where attention is currency, emotion is the exchange rate.”
Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack replaces himself with an AI
Carmichael-Jack previously founded international branding agency Burst Digital.
“Our vision is to have teams of Artisans working alongside, and integrated within, human teams,” he said in our interview.
He also previously founded Assist, a platform for booking on-demand services in London. “I created the business as a solo founder with an outsourced development team,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
“Over 3,000 service professionals signed up to the platform in the six months it was live.”