Latest news with #JasparCarmichael-Jack
Metro
2 days ago
- Business
- Metro
The real reason behind 'Stop Hiring Humans' ads appearing on the Tube
Staring mindlessly at adverts on the London Underground as your train whizzes from station to station is a common occurrence for commuters in the capital. But a new advertising campaign which recently arrived on the Tube is getting much more attention – possibly for the wrong reasons. The posters, found in London Bridge as well as other parts of the network, are suggesting in large letters that businesses should 'hire artisans, not humans', adding that 'the era of AI employees is here'. Slogans on other posters include 'Artisans don't spend half the year on holiday' or 'Artisans don't 'WFH' from Ibiza'. They're the brainchild of Artisan, an AI company which started in Silicon Valley in 2023 and has since received $25million (£18million) in funding. The business aims to build a company powered by AI employees called Artisans – but their advertising campaign has proved controversial, with its CEO facing death threats and hate mail. 'Stop hiring humans' posters and billboards first started popping up in San Francisco last December, coinciding with Artisan appearing at TechCrunch Disrupt, an annual tech conference. It quickly went viral, with an X post about its deliberately misspelt 'stop hirring humans' billboard being seen more than 230,000 times. Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who's originally from Surrey, said he and the company had received thousands of death threats since the campaign launched. After hosting an unofficial 'ask me anything' Q&A session on Reddit, he received a swathe of comments, very few of which were positive in any way. These included one simply saying 'Oh hi, f*** you', another asking 'Why doesn't the company replace you with AI?', a third saying 'How does it feel to be the poster child of a dystopic future?', and another asking 'You realise you're the villain, right?'. But last month, Jaspar doubled down on the 'rage-bait' marketing campaign, despite the thousands of threats he'd received. He has however since backtracked slightly on his previous message, saying the campaign was meant to grab attention rather than undermining human workers. 'We didn't expect people to get so mad,' Jaspar said in a blog post. 'The goal of the campaign was always to rage bait, but we never expected the level of backlash we ended up seeing. 'Looking forward, we'll likely tone down the messaging to be more in line with what we actually believe rather than just clickbaiting..! More Trending 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.' Metro has reached out to Jaspar Carmichael-Jack for comment Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: 'Stupid' Apple Pay prank plagues commuters on London Tube MORE: King Charles serenaded by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's wedding singers at SXSW London MORE: Fare dodger barges his way through barriers – and straight into arms of police
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Glade Brook Leads $25M Bet On Artisan, The AI Startup Backed By Y Combinator, HubSpot, And Sequoia To Replace Human Sales Teams
In a bold move to redefine the sales landscape, Artisan, a San Francisco-based startup, has secured a $25 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Glade Brook Capital, with participation from notable investors including Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures (NYSE:HUBS), Oliver Jung, Day One Ventures, BOND, Soma Capital, and Sequoia Scout, according to Artisan. Don't Miss: 'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm — . Founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Sam Stallings, Artisan aims to revolutionize the workplace by replacing repetitive tasks with AI employees, known as 'Artisans.' According to the startup's page, their first product, Ava, is an AI Business Development Representative that automates the entire outbound sales process. Ava identifies leads, conducts research, crafts personalized messages, and schedules meetings across multiple channels, including email and LinkedIn. Ava is powered by a multi-agent system and a real-time context engine that monitors the web for buying signals such as job changes, new funding, or leadership moves. This allows her to engage prospects at the optimal time with tailored messages. According to Artisan, companies like SumUp have reported receiving eight to 15 positive replies per week from hard-to-reach small and medium-sized businesses without increasing their sales staff. Trending: BlackRock is calling 2025 the year of alternative assets. Ava's capabilities extend to managing email deliverability with a suite of tools designed to optimize every aspect of email campaigns. This includes email warm-up procedures and placement tests to ensure that emails reach their intended recipients. By automating these processes, Ava allows businesses to scale their outbound sales efforts effortlessly, freeing up valuable time and resources that can be redirected toward other important areas. Artisan's approach differs from traditional AI integrations by offering fully autonomous AI employees that take over specific job functions. The company believes that AI employees should be held to the same standards as human workers: they must perform their tasks effectively or not at all. This philosophy has driven the development of Ava from a supervised tool to an independent agent capable of managing complex outbound strategies and optimizing for pipeline impact. The recent funding will be used to accelerate research and development, expand the AI workforce, and enhance the Artisan Sales platform. The startup plans to introduce two new AI employees later this year: Aaron, an Inbound SDR Artisan who will qualify and route inbound leads, and Aria, a Meeting Assistant Artisan responsible for scheduling, reminders, and post-call provocative 'Stop Hiring Humans' marketing campaign has sparked conversations about the role of AI in the workplace. While the campaign was designed to attract attention, CEO Carmichael-Jack clarified in a blog that the company's goal is not to eliminate human workers but to free them from mundane tasks so they can focus on more creative and strategic work. With a growing team of 35 employees and plans to hire 22 more, Artisan is set to lead the charge in transforming the workplace through AI, according to TechCrunch. The company's approach and strong investor backing suggest a promising future for AI-driven automation in business operations. Read Next: Here's what Americans think you need to be considered wealthy. Inspired by Uber and Airbnb – Deloitte's fastest-growing software company is transforming 7 billion smartphones into income-generating assets – Image: Shutterstock Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? HUBSPOT (HUBS): Free Stock Analysis Report This article Glade Brook Leads $25M Bet On Artisan, The AI Startup Backed By Y Combinator, HubSpot, And Sequoia To Replace Human Sales Teams originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Glade Brook Leads $25M Bet On Artisan, The AI Startup Backed By Y Combinator, HubSpot, And Sequoia To Replace Human Sales Teams
In a bold move to redefine the sales landscape, Artisan, a San Francisco-based startup, has secured a $25 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Glade Brook Capital, with participation from notable investors including Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures (NYSE:HUBS), Oliver Jung, Day One Ventures, BOND, Soma Capital, and Sequoia Scout, according to Artisan. Don't Miss: 'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm — . Founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Sam Stallings, Artisan aims to revolutionize the workplace by replacing repetitive tasks with AI employees, known as 'Artisans.' According to the startup's page, their first product, Ava, is an AI Business Development Representative that automates the entire outbound sales process. Ava identifies leads, conducts research, crafts personalized messages, and schedules meetings across multiple channels, including email and LinkedIn. Ava is powered by a multi-agent system and a real-time context engine that monitors the web for buying signals such as job changes, new funding, or leadership moves. This allows her to engage prospects at the optimal time with tailored messages. According to Artisan, companies like SumUp have reported receiving eight to 15 positive replies per week from hard-to-reach small and medium-sized businesses without increasing their sales staff. Trending: BlackRock is calling 2025 the year of alternative assets. Ava's capabilities extend to managing email deliverability with a suite of tools designed to optimize every aspect of email campaigns. This includes email warm-up procedures and placement tests to ensure that emails reach their intended recipients. By automating these processes, Ava allows businesses to scale their outbound sales efforts effortlessly, freeing up valuable time and resources that can be redirected toward other important areas. Artisan's approach differs from traditional AI integrations by offering fully autonomous AI employees that take over specific job functions. The company believes that AI employees should be held to the same standards as human workers: they must perform their tasks effectively or not at all. This philosophy has driven the development of Ava from a supervised tool to an independent agent capable of managing complex outbound strategies and optimizing for pipeline impact. The recent funding will be used to accelerate research and development, expand the AI workforce, and enhance the Artisan Sales platform. The startup plans to introduce two new AI employees later this year: Aaron, an Inbound SDR Artisan who will qualify and route inbound leads, and Aria, a Meeting Assistant Artisan responsible for scheduling, reminders, and post-call provocative 'Stop Hiring Humans' marketing campaign has sparked conversations about the role of AI in the workplace. While the campaign was designed to attract attention, CEO Carmichael-Jack clarified in a blog that the company's goal is not to eliminate human workers but to free them from mundane tasks so they can focus on more creative and strategic work. With a growing team of 35 employees and plans to hire 22 more, Artisan is set to lead the charge in transforming the workplace through AI, according to TechCrunch. The company's approach and strong investor backing suggest a promising future for AI-driven automation in business operations. Read Next: Here's what Americans think you need to be considered wealthy. Inspired by Uber and Airbnb – Deloitte's fastest-growing software company is transforming 7 billion smartphones into income-generating assets – Image: Shutterstock Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? HUBSPOT (HUBS): Free Stock Analysis Report This article Glade Brook Leads $25M Bet On Artisan, The AI Startup Backed By Y Combinator, HubSpot, And Sequoia To Replace Human Sales Teams originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Artisan, the 'stop hiring humans' AI agent startup, raises $25M -- and is still hiring humans
It's been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan. Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as well. A year ago, Artisan was one of the most sought-after grads from the winter 2024 Y Combinator class, raising $12 million in September, one of the biggest rounds of the cohort. In between, Carmichael-Jack and his co-founder, 30-year-old Sam Stallings (a former IBM product manager), have experienced plenty of early-stage chaos. Artisan is one of a bevy of fast-growing startups in the highly watched AI sales development representative (AI SDR) market. It's probably best known for its "Stop Hiring Humans" marketing campaign that has generated many news articles, social media posts, comments, and a few death threats, says the company. On April 1, Carmichael-Jack even announced his "resignation" in response to the backlash, saying he was being replaced by an "AI CEO." It was an April's Fool joke and Carmichael-Jack is still very much CEO. More seriously, when asked if he truly believes that AI will replace people, Carmichael-Jack says, 'No, which is ironic, because we did the billboards that said, 'stop hiring humans' but that was mostly just for attention.' 'Human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content,' he says. In fact, his company employs 35 humans and is looking to hire another 22, including in sales, he says. It also just hired a new CTO, Ming Li, who came by way of Deel, Rippling, TikTok, and Google. Artisan, like others in the AI SDR market, also experienced its fair share of customers quitting the product, Carmichael-Jack admits. Entry-level sales seems like an obvious use for AI agents: replacing humans cranking out cold emails. But this is a very young industry, and it has developed a reputation for products that don't work well. First-generation AI SDRs "get a pretty low response rate" and have "relatively high churn" among their customers," says Carmichael-Jack. "I just cringe in pain" when looking at the email pitches Artisan's YC-era product wrote, he said. "We had extremely bad hallucinations when we first launched." But over the past year, Artisan claims that it has (mostly) fixed that. Its flagship product, Ava, only hallucinates maybe one in 10,000 emails, if that, says Carmichael-Jack. By working closely with model provider Anthropic, Artisan created tighter prompts. Companies enter information via a form into Ava and then use a set of rigid prompts. that don't "leave room for hallucination, because it's fed all of the information directly,' he describes. Carmichael-Jack says that Ava has now improved to the point where Artisan counts 250 companies as customers, and has reached $5 million in annual recurring revenue. Artisan is also working on two new AI agent products: Aaron, which will handle inbound messages, and Aria, a meeting manager assistant. Both are scheduled to launch by the end of 2025. Carmichael-Jack recounted another hard lesson: Not every company should be using AI SDR. There are even some entire industries, like offshore development agencies, that Artisan won't take on anymore. "Some customers will just completely flop" with agentic outbound sales, says Carmichael-Jack — and he lets them walk. Like its rivals, Artisan offers contracts that include break clauses allowing customers to end early. "We've historically sold to a lot of the wrong customers, and learned the hard way that it's not just like a typical SaaS product where you can sell to everyone — you have to actually qualify pretty heavily," says Carmichael-Jack. Some customers don't generate enough responses using Artisan's agents, while others generate too many low-quality ones, forcing humans to spend too much effort sorting promising leads from the dead ends. The sweet spot, says Carmichael-Jack, is about a 1% response rate. But Artisan is also among the AI SDR vendors that are learning how to target their outreach better. As the sales automation industry has been doing for over a decade, AI SDR systems like Artisan and Actively AI are starting to read and incorporate signals from social media posts, fundraising data, news stories and the like to better know who to target at all. Carmichael-Jack says Artisan's particular edge is a proprietary database of brick-and-mortar businesses. Beyond that, Artisan is addressing the industry's shaky reputation by also piloting a new flexible "success-based pricing" option with That's the new agentic billing platform founded by Manny Medina, co-founder and former CEO of Outreach. Customers can use instead of signing a long-term contract and pay per response. "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." This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Sign in to access your portfolio
Forbes
09-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Artisan Raises $25M To Replace Repetitive Work With AI Employees
"Stop Hiring Humans" billboard campaign Artisan, the YC-backed startup behind viral campaigns and AI-powered employees known as Artisans, today announced a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, a $2 billion global growth equity firm with a portfolio that includes xAI, Perplexity, Stripe, Revolut, SpaceX, Airbnb, and Uber. The funding follows the breakout success of its 'Stop Hiring Humans' billboard campaign, which generated over 1 billion online impressions and introduced the world to Ava—the company's flagship AI BDR now hired by more than 250 organizations. Additional investors in the round include Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others. Founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Samantha Stallings, Artisan is building the next paradigm of software: a sleek, unified platform powered by AI employees, Artisans. Its flagship Artisan, Ava, automates outbound sales, replacing repetitive prospecting work with a smarter, fully autonomous system. The company is focused on two core goals: - Advancing AI employees from human-assisted to fully autonomous, capable of managing complex workflows with minimal oversight. - Consolidating the fragmented SaaS landscape into one intuitive platform, starting with outbound sales. 'Let's be honest, most companies waste millions paying talented people to do repetitive work that AI can handle better.' said Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the 23-year-old co-founder and CEO of Artisan. 'Having brilliant minds stuck prospecting, personalizing emails, and tracking deliverability is a waste of human potential.' Ava is powered by Artisan's proprietary AI infrastructure: a model-agnostic, multi-agent system that handles each stage of outbound—from targeting and researching to writing and sending. Her real-time context engine scrapes the web for buying signals such as leadership changes, job postings, and funding announcements to ensure outreach is perfectly timed. Enterprise fintech company SumUp is one of hundreds of customers using Ava to scale outreach. By leveraging Artisan's unique local business targeting, integrating data from Google Maps, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google Reviews, SumUp receives 8–15 positive responses per week from previously unreachable local SMBs. 'At SumUp, we prioritize efficient and scalable growth,' said Karlo Buik, Growth Lead at SumUp. 'Artisan's platform streamlines our outreach and gives us the insights we need to reach the right businesses in meaningful ways.' As part of its mission to create real value—not vanity metrics—Artisan is piloting a new success-based pricing model through a partnership with the platform founded by Manny Medina, co-founder and former CEO of Outreach. 'We don't want to charge customers unless we're actually creating outcomes,' said Carmichael-Jack. 'Our north star is impact. If Ava is generating real conversations, booked meetings, or pipeline—that's when we should get paid.' Unlike traditional tools, Artisan is pioneering intent-driven outbound with advanced capabilities that allow Ava to engage prospects at exactly the right moment: 'Outbound the way it's done today is going to stop working,' said Carmichael-Jack. 'We're building products that make AI more intent-driven and, ironically, more human—so humans can focus on the things they're uniquely great at.' To accelerate product development, Artisan has appointed Ming Li as Chief Technology Officer. Li previously served as VP of Technology at unicorn Deel, and has led engineering teams at Rippling, TikTok, and Google. He joins alongside four senior engineers from Rippling, significantly expanding Artisan's technical depth as it scales its platform and expands into new product categories. Following Ava's success, Artisan plans to launch two new AI employees by the end of 2025: Aaron, an Inbound SDR Artisan, and Aria, a Meeting Assistant Artisan. Both will operate within the Artisan Sales ecosystem. 'We're building the full go-to-market ecosystem,' said Jaspar. 'One platform with every core product across sales, marketing, and customer success–powered by Artisans doing the work AI does best, and seamless software enabling humans to do theirs. Moving chronologically down the sales cycle, we're taking on each legacy category-leading SaaS player one by one.' As AI continues to reshape the future of work, Artisan is betting that the next generation of enterprise software won't just support human workflows—it will replace them where it makes sense. By automating the most repetitive, time-consuming tasks with intelligent, autonomous AI employees, Artisan is redefining what productivity looks like for go-to-market teams.
