$25 Million Says You Shouldn’t Hire Humans

By now, the “Stop Hiring Humans” billboard campaign is infamous. It drew eyeballs, sparked online outrage, earned media coverage across tech publications and, according to the company, even led to death threats. But if there were any doubts about whether Artisan, the startup behind the provocations, was a serious player in the AI sales tech market, its latest $25 million Series A round should put them to rest.

_{Credits: Artisan}

Led by Glade Brook Capital and joined by backers including Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, and HubSpot Ventures, the new funding marks a milestone for the young company and its 23-year-old founder, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack. The round follows a $12 million raise just months ago and cements Artisan’s position as one of the most closely watched alumni from Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch.

But Artisan’s story is not just one of hype and headlines. Behind the billboards and April Fool’s antics Carmichael-Jack publicly “resigned” as CEO on April 1, claiming he’d been replaced by an AI, it’s clear the startup has been learning in real-time how complex, messy, and human the AI SDR space still is.

It’s easy to dismiss Artisan’s early marketing as pure provocation. Carmichael-Jack himself admits that much of it was just to get attention. “No, which is ironic,” he told TechCrunch when asked if he really believes humans should be replaced, “because we did the billboards that said, ‘stop hiring humans’ but that was mostly just for attention.”

And it worked. Artisan quickly became one of the most discussed names in the AI sales space, a category that, despite its promise, remains riddled with technical limitations and trust issues. “I just cringe in pain” is how Carmichael-Jack describes the cold email pitches generated by Artisan’s early product during its YC days. He acknowledges they were full of hallucinations, a problem he claims has now been mostly fixed.

Partnering with Anthropic, Artisan reworked its prompting system to be far more rigid. The company’s flagship agent, Ava, now pulls from structured inputs provided by clients, leaving “no room for hallucination,” Carmichael-Jack says. Artisan claims Ava only hallucinates one in every 10,000 emails today down from an embarrassing norm in the early days.

That investment in quality has paid off. Artisan now boasts 250 customers and says it has hit $5 million in annual recurring revenue. But those figures didn’t come without friction.

Not Every Business Is Ready for an AI SDR

A key realization for Carmichael-Jack and his co-founder Sam Stallings (a former IBM product manager) has been that AI SDRs aren’t for everyone. Unlike traditional SaaS, where broad customer acquisition is the norm, Artisan had to become selective.

“Some customers will just completely flop with agentic outbound sales,” Carmichael-Jack admits. The company has gone so far as to blacklist entire industries offshore development agencies among them after poor product-customer fits. Others were let go after generating either too few responses or too many low-quality leads that overwhelmed human staff.

The sweet spot? Around a 1% response rate, according to the CEO. Below that, clients don’t get enough value. Above it, they’re buried in noise. Artisan now qualifies potential clients more rigorously and offers contracts with break clauses, allowing unsatisfied customers to walk away.

These growing pains are not unique to Artisan. The AI SDR market is still young, and many early tools have developed a reputation for overpromising and underdelivering. The churn rates are high. The success stories, rare.

Still, Artisan is trying to tilt the odds in its favor.

Hiring Humans, After All

The startup that told the world to stop hiring humans is now hiring aggressively. Artisan has grown to 35 employees and plans to add 22 more, including technical and sales hires. It recently brought on a new CTO, Ming Li, whose resume spans roles at Deel, Rippling, TikTok, and Google. 

That human capital is part of what Carmichael-Jack now sees as essential. “Human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content,” he says. The trick is making the technology do just enough work to make the human work more meaningful not redundant.

Smarter Targeting, Flexible Pricing

As the technology matures, so do the strategies. Artisan is improving how it identifies and reaches prospects, layering in signals from social media, fundraising announcements, and news stories a method long used by traditional sales automation platforms.

One particularly interesting move is Artisan’s partnership with Paid.ai, a performance-based billing platform founded by former Outreach CEO Manny Medina. Instead of charging flat fees, Artisan will pilot success-based pricing, clients only pay for the responses Ava generates.

“We should only really be selling to people if they get value from the product,” Carmichael-Jack says. “If we don’t get them value, then we shouldn’t be charging them money.”

Artisan isn’t stopping with Ava. The company is working on two new agent products: Aaron, which will manage inbound sales messages, and Aria, a meeting assistant. Both are expected to launch by the end of 2025.

Whether these new tools will fare better than earlier versions remains to be seen. But the company’s willingness to reflect publicly on missteps and course-correct suggests a founder and a team that’s maturing quickly.

A year ago, Artisan was an audacious YC grad with a viral billboard and an AI SDR prone to fabricating sales pitches. Today, it’s a 35-person team led by a 23-year-old CEO managing millions in venture capital, with real revenue and a more nuanced understanding of where its technology fits and where it doesn’t.

We don’t actually want people to stop hiring humans, we’re actively hiring across all roles, and I don’t actually think AI is dystopian. The real goal for us is to automate the work that humans don’t enjoy, and to make every job more human. Nobody wants to spend 8 hours a day researching people and writing outbound emails, so we built Ava to do it for them.

In the long run, the stop hiring humans campaign tagline will have more merit. Inevitably as more and more human productivity is taken over by AI, we should first see a 4-day work week. Eventually, we should live in a world where everyone gets UBI, productivity is driven entirely by robots, we’re all free to do whatever we want and you can truly stop hiring humans, but today is not that day. In my opinion, that day will in fact be utopia.