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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Artisan is one of a bevy of fast-growing startups in the highly watched AI sales development representative<\/a> (AI SDR) market. It\u2019s probably best known for its \u201cStop Hiring Humans\u201d marketing campaign<\/a> that has generated many news articles, social media posts, comments, and a few death threats, says the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n On April 1, Carmichael-Jack even announced his \u201cresignation\u201d<\/a> in response to the backlash, saying he was being replaced by an \u201cAI CEO.\u201d It was an April\u2019s Fool joke and Carmichael-Jack is still very much CEO.<\/p>\n More seriously, when asked if he truly believes that AI will replace people, Carmichael-Jack says, \u201cNo, which is ironic, because we did the billboards that said, \u2018stop hiring humans\u2019 but that was mostly just for attention.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHuman labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n Churning customers<\/p>\n Artisan, like others in the AI SDR market<\/a>, also experienced its fair share of customers quitting the product, Carmichael-Jack admits.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t work well.\u00a0<\/p>\n First-generation AI SDRs \u201cget a pretty low response rate\u201d and have \u201crelatively high churn\u201d among their customers,\u201d says Carmichael-Jack. \u201cI just cringe in pain\u201d when looking at the email pitches Artisan\u2019s YC-era product wrote, he said. \u201cWe had extremely bad hallucinations when we first launched.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019t \u201cleave room for hallucination, because it\u2019s fed all of the information directly,\u201d he describes.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t take on anymore.<\/p>\n \u201cSome customers will just completely flop\u201d with agentic outbound sales, says Carmichael-Jack \u2014 and he lets them walk. Like its rivals, Artisan offers contracts that include break clauses allowing customers to end early.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve historically sold to a lot of the wrong customers, and learned the hard way that it\u2019s not just like a typical SaaS product where you can sell to everyone \u2014 you have to actually qualify pretty heavily,\u201d says Carmichael-Jack.<\/p>\n Some customers don\u2019t generate enough responses using Artisan\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n But Artisan is also among the AI SDR vendors that are learning how to target their outreach better.\u00a0As the sales automation industry has been doing for over a decade, AI SDR systems like Artisan and Actively AI<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Carmichael-Jack says Artisan\u2019s particular edge is a proprietary database of brick-and-mortar businesses. Beyond that, Artisan is addressing the industry\u2019s shaky reputation by also piloting a new flexible \u201csuccess-based pricing\u201d option with Paid.ai. That\u2019s the new agentic billing platform founded by Manny Medina<\/a>, co-founder and former CEO of Outreach.<\/p>\n Customers can use Paid.ai instead of signing a long-term contract and pay per response.<\/p>\n \u201cWe should only really be selling to people if they get value from the product,\u201d Carmichael-Jack says. \u201cIf we don\u2019t get them value, then we shouldn\u2019t be charging them money.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,4809,7553,1942,7551,2915,7552,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-11034","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-agents","10":"tag-ai-sdr","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artisan","13":"tag-exclusive","14":"tag-glade-brook-capital","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114319967048684364","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Artisan](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Artisan-billboard-San-Francisco.jpg\")
Artisan\u2019s stop hiring humans billboard in San FranciscoImage Credits:<\/strong>Artisan<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/GettyImages-2188469160.jpg\")
An ad for AI company Artisan in San FranciscoImage Credits:<\/strong>Justin Sullivan \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n