Artisan told companies to “stop hiring humans” for sales. Now it’s hiring one for just that job.
A San Francisco bus stop shelter sports an ad for Artisan AI reading “Stop Hiring Humans” and “For Work They Hate.” Gado/Getty Images Artisan, maker of an AI business development representative named Ava, became infamous in 2025 for plastering San Francisco with billboards calling on companies to “Stop Hiring Humans.” But now, it’s hiring a…
A San Francisco bus stop shelter sports an ad for Artisan AI reading “Stop Hiring Humans” and “For Work They Hate.”
Gado/Getty Images
Artisan, maker of an AI business development representative named Ava, became infamous in 2025 for plastering San Francisco with billboards calling on companies to “Stop Hiring Humans.” But now, it’s hiring a human for that very same role.
The company’s surprising move comes amid a broader market reckoning over whether AI—and AI agents, in particular—will take people’s jobs. As Artisan recognized, the promise of replacing expensive and messy humans with technology has been an appealing narrative to businesses, but the reality is not quite so.
“We always had a disclaimer around ‘Stop Hiring Humans,’” CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack told PitchBook. “It was more just viral marketing; you can’t stop hiring humans.”
The conversation with Carmichael-Jack discussed Artisan’s viral marketing campaign and why human workers aren’t going away. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Sign up for The Daily Pitch newsletter Subscribe
PitchBook: You spent millions on billboards telling the world to stop hiring humans, but now you’re hiring a new one and retiring the slogan. Why?
Carmichael-Jack: Well, one, we have a lot of big enterprise customers now, and sometimes when the messaging that we have up front is “Stop Hiring Humans,” then when we go through a rollout in a company, the employees are like “hey, wait, these people want to replace me,” and that has never been the core message. The majority of the time, when we’ve seen companies roll out our product, they’re not doing it in replacement of headcount. But that messaging, for us, enabled us to go very viral.
JASPAR
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack
Sam Barnes/Getty Images
So, if that wasn’t the core message, then what was it?
It’s “stop hiring humans for work that AI can do better, that you don’t need a human for, work that humans are not uniquely positioned to do in a better way than AI.” Obviously, you can’t put that on a billboard because it’s not going to get engagement.
The original thesis behind Artisan, which has been adopted by a whole host of agentic startups, is that you would eat into labor budgets, not software. By putting a human back in, aren’t you just competing for software spend like everyone else?
No, not really, because the way our product works—and the way Ava works as an AI employee—is that each person on your team now has the leverage of what five people had before. So even though we’re not positioning it to replace people, you could have one person doing the output of five people.
Wait, doesn’t that mean an employer wouldn’t hire those other five employees?
I don’t really think that productivity gains mean you don’t hire people. If you had a tool that made every engineer produce five times more code, which we do now have, you wouldn’t hire five times less engineers.
If you have people that have more output, then it makes the amount that you pay them more worth it. So it makes sense to have more people. So I think that’s the kind of way that we see it evolving.
Is this an admission that the technology has hit a wall?
No, definitely not, the technology is getting better and better.
I think it’s more of: People initially thought that maybe AI would actually take over the work, and then humans wouldn’t have to work. But in reality, it’s more that when each human’s productivity goes up, you want more humans because you want more productivity. Like our society has a relentless desire to grow, and our economy has a relentless desire to grow.
Does walking back the slogan, in your eyes, amount to admitting a weakness in what Artisan’s technology can and can’t do?
It’s not a weakness, but there definitely is a boundary of work that AI can and cannot do, both legally and just in practice. I think it is acknowledging the boundary, and it’s kind of a realization that having more leverage and more productivity doesn’t disincentivize hiring more people. It actually incentivizes it.
Why are you increasing your headcount now?
One thing that we’re doing right now is trying to map out what the sales org of the future looks like, and map out what the role of a [business development representative] will be, and that’s why we’re hiring a BDR. Right now we have the output of a BDR org of 20 people without having any BDRs on the team, but we know that we could leverage that significantly higher.
So we’re hiring a business development representative to see what is possible with AI and humans working together in this org.
The other important thing is, AI can’t legally cold call or go to conferences.
Those limits are set by law and etiquette. Do you think if those two things change, we can stop hiring humans? Would you bring the billboards back if those things changed?
Regardless of how good the technology gets, I don’t think that human work is going to be going anywhere, really ever. Even if an AI could go to a conference. I don’t think it’s going to get many meetings with people there because it’s just like there’s some things that are a unique medium and that people would rather interact with a human for.
So, it’s not that AI won’t do a lot of the work that we do. It’s that there’s always going to be new work for humans to do.
I don’t think we’ll ever bring the billboards back.
Lastly, Artisan was called many names. “The most hated startup in San Francisco” and other things that aren’t as polite. What was your favorite thing you got called in response to the “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign?
I don’t know, to be honest. I don’t really get bothered, though. I mean, it’s ultimately my No. 1 goal to make sure the company grows. I don’t care if I’m a sacrificial lamb.
This article originally appeared on PitchBook News
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
