Jaspar Carmichael-Jack had an idea to market his AI startup — a pretty clever one, he thought. Mount a trollish ad campaign calculated to piss off people in San Francisco, then surf the wave of viral outrage to new customers and investment for his company Artisan, which sells AI agents for use as virtual employees.
He even had the perfect tagline: “Stop hiring humans.” It was, he thought, guaranteed to incite backlash in a city with more than its share of progressive labor types.
So, last year, Artisan rented the main booth at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and plastered the slogan across it, beneath the face of “Ava,” its AI employee.
Here’s what happened next: nothing.
“It didn’t really pick up,” Carmichael-Jack said. It seemed the message had left conferencegoers baffled rather than angry.
So the company went bigger, taking out a billboard along Highway 101 near SFO with the image and tagline. That, too, met with a lukewarm response. The team members were so discouraged that they resorted to anonymously insulting their own campaign on Reddit in an effort at generating buzz.
“We posted stuff like ‘Can you believe they’re doing this?’” The post got some traction, but it wasn’t anywhere near the response he’d hoped for.
Since when had it been so hard to get San Franciscans to protest rapacious capitalism?
Carmichael-Jack decided to give it one more shot, blitzing 50 bus shelters around the city with the ad.
That one did the trick — almost too well.
He was on a work trip to Miami when the posters went up. As the death threats on social media piled up into the thousands, he realized it might be wise not to return home. “I was like, I’m not going back to SF,” Carmichael-Jack said. “I will get murdered if I go back.”
He camped out, first in Miami, then in London. His cofounder and chief of staff skipped town in fear.
The plan to get a controversial engagement had worked. Amid the hate, Carmichael-Jack and his team started getting admiring notes from marketing managers at other startups. Then investors started calling.
Four months later, Artisan has raised an unannounced $25 million series A round. It now has around 250 customers and $5 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Carmichael-Jack.
Naturally, the company is using the money to hire humans.
‘Everyone knows us’
Carmichael-Jack, 23, grew up in Surrey, England, and was a perennial side hustler selling Costco candy, iPhone cases bought off Alibaba, and influencer website domains from his bedroom. After high school, he moved to London to start a TaskRabbit-like service and, later, a marketing agency he ran while traveling the world.
After ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022, Carmichael-Jack hunkered down in an apartment in Tulum, Mexico, and came up with the idea for Artisan — a company that would create AI employees for every industry. Unlike chatbots or search engines, AI employees, or “agents,” are proactive and don’t need continual human oversight.
But lacking technical skills, he was unable to find a team to work on his idea until late 2023. His first partner didn’t work out and filed a bitter lawsuit, after which cofounder Sam Stallings came on board. The two now live in adjoining bedrooms and frequent the gym together, where they discuss company strategy while running on Equinox treadmills.
After going through Y Combinator in early 2024, the startup moved into a swanky $27,000 per month Russian Hill residence. The minimalist, modern mansion with a panoramic view became the command center that launched San Francisco’s most divisive ad campaign in recent memory.
On the day they moved in, Carmichael-Jack saw a billboard mounted on the side of a Marina building. He called the owner and rented it for a year, then got to work envisioning a blockbuster marketing campaign to announce Artisan’s arrival. The square-jawed founder, who typically wears a black T-shirt and Oura ring on his right index finger, decided that stoking people’s fears about being replaced by AI would almost certainly hit a nerve.
“I wake up from my bedroom and see Ava’s face,” said Carmichael-Jack, referring to the company’s first AI employee, who functions as a sales representative. “It just makes me happy.”
He’s also happy that the campaign achieved what most early-stage startups can only dream of: brand-name recognition.
Carmichael-Jack said that when he’s networking at conferences or socializing at Balboa Cafe on a Friday night, he no longer has to explain what he does.
“When I meet people and say I do Artisan, they say, ‘Stop hiring humans!’” he said. “Everyone knows us.”
Notwithstanding the slogan, Artisan is on a hiring spree. The company is poaching top talent from across the Valley to make Ava more effective and launch other products, like an AI recruiter named Blake. Ming Li, a former executive at Deel, recently joined as CTO, and five engineers are coming over from Rippling, according to Carmichael-Jack.
In fact, Artisan is hiring so many employees that it’ll soon move out of the Russian Hill pad to an office in the Financial District. Carmichael-Jack said, half joking, that he’s looking for space that overlooks a billboard.
Artisan is one of dozens of startups in a furious race to build effective AI employees. Big Tech, too, is in on the action. Earlier this year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said this is the last generation to manage only humans, and Salesforce’s mission is to become “the No. 1 digital labor provider, period” to other companies.
Carmichael-Jack plans to build Artisan for the next few decades into a multi-product Big Tech behemoth. And what will humans be up to then, when AI has taken over all our jobs? Carmichael-Jack said, rather optimistically, that there’s no need to fret.
“Human activities become more valuable when you have infinite AI labor,” he said, recognizing that this nuance wasn’t communicated through the startup’s guerrilla ad campaign. “We don’t hate humans as much as it may seem that we do. We actually love humans.”