A British entrepreneur has launched a major advertising campaign in San Francisco urging people to stop hiring humans.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, aged 23 and from Surrey, founded AI employee startup Artisan AI in Silicon Valley last year with Dr Rupert Dodkins, who has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Oxford.
Dr Dodkins left the company in May.
Artisan AI, which has raised $21.1 million in funding and participated in the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator programme, 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 us in an interview late last year that this makes them notably distinct from existing solutions, which require constant management from a human.
Now a widespread ad campaign on billboards around San Francisco containing messages including ‘stop hiring humans’ is promoting its first Artisan, Ava, a digital sales representative who is described in an Artisan AI X post as “an AI BDR (business development rep) on steroids… she’s available to hire now”.
Other messages from the billboard campaign to cause a storm on social media include: ‘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’.
Carmichael-Jack told SFGate of the ads: “They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI.
“The way the world works is changing… we wanted something that would draw eyes — you don’t draw eyes with boring messaging.”
The CEO explained to us last year: “Ava is a sales representative. Right now, she automates the full outbound sales cycle, but she will soon be able to automate the entire sales cycle, doing most things herself and acting as a co-pilot to the human when needed,” he explains.
“[This is done through a] feature-rich SaaS platform that is managed entirely by talking to her on Slack. Ava prospects with a database of over 250 million leads, writes hyper-personalised emails, replies to prospects’ questions, and books meetings into human sales development representatives’ calendars.”
He added that in 2024 it planned to “release five further Artisans to do everything from marketing to financial analysis”, but Ava seems to be the only Artisan the company is currently pushing.
The company, which has grown its own workforce to 30 real-life people, has already reached $1m in annual recurring revenue.
Carmichael-Jack – who told us Ava was launched within months of being sketched out on paper – 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.”
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