Friday afternoon in San Francisco: On one side of Mission Street, hotel workers chanted and banged on a drum outside the Marriott Marquis, part of a monthslong strike for higher wages and more jobs. On the other, a tech company’s billboard proclaimed, “Stop hiring humans.”

Various versions of the provocative advertisements are emblazoned across the city on rotating screen displays on bus shelters and on classic vinyl billboards on poles and buildings, plugging the San Francisco startup Artisan.

The company has just 30 employees and is less than 2 years old; its only existing product is an artificial intelligence “sales agent” called Artisan, built to automate the work of finding and messaging potential customers. It’s a classic AI-age idea, one of many such tools flooding the tech world.

But the billboards in San Francisco are less routine. Bleak might be a better word, or mean-spirited. And in a city laden with jargony advertisements, these are easy to understand. Most feature a dark-haired, purple-eyed persona and a few rows of text. Some critique humans and remote work: “Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance” and “Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today.” Others are more direct: “Hire Artisans, not humans.” Several include the line, “The era of AI employees is here.”

The gist is crystal clear: Artisan is selling automation to employers. In a video spot about the “sales agent” tool online, Artisan says it works with “no human input” and “costs 96% less than hiring someone to do her job.” (More on that pronoun later.)

In the context of tech’s layoffs and AI’s specter, the ads have caused affront far beyond Mission Street. In a piece for Creative Bloq, British journalist Natalie Fear called the billboards a “dystopian nightmare.” Thousands of Redditors have seen posts about the ads in r/ThatsInsane (“giving the finger to all artists, writers, designers jobs,” the poster wrote) and r/graphic_design (Post title: “Human-designed billboard wants people to stop hiring humans…”).

Commenters piled on. “Have an AI child, not a real one,” one wrote, “they are much cheaper.” Another suggested that someone burn the billboard. One simply wrote: “It’s SF, they hate people.”

If you asked how Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack responds to critiques of the billboards. He acknowledged the ads’ “dystopian” tone but stood by it.

“They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI,” said the young CEO over text. “The way the world works is changing.”

Carmichael-Jack said his startup has seen a “crazy escalation” in its brand awareness thanks to the monthlong billboard campaign, plus a spike in sales leads. Artisan doesn’t have that many billboards up, he added, not providing a specific number, but they’ve been “very impactful.” In other words, the inflammatory ads served their purpose.

“We wanted something that would draw eyes — you don’t draw eyes with boring messaging,” the CEO said.
Artisan also used “Stop hiring humans” — in truly humongous font — as its booth banner at TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup-focused San Francisco conference in October. The billboards illustrate how scrappy startups can stand out from established tech giants with corporate reputations to uphold. Salesforce incessantly plugged its similar “Agentforce” product at its Dreamforce megaconference in September but usually threw in a phrase about the AI agents working with humans too.

No such restraint at Artisan. And its ambitions go higher. The video plugging “Ava” teased new niches for Artisan tools beyond sales, in marketing, recruitment, design and finance. It also made the wild declaration: “Ava marks the beginning of the next industrial revolution.”

If you asked Carmichael-Jack about the decision to give his AI product a human name and face. It’s far from unusual — think Siri, Alexa — but it’s striking on the ads. The “Stop hiring humans” text sits just above an image of a woman. Aside from the purple eyes, matte skin and too-symmetrical face, it could easily be a real person.

The CEO said, “People still want to work with humans, and working with our Ava feels more like working with a human than a [software-as-a-service] product, so it makes sense for us to humanize her.”
And therein lies the quandary for executives who might consider replacing their sales reps with AI tools. When people still want to work with other humans, where does that leave the companies that decide to stop hiring them? Based on the rising interest in tools like Artisan, we may not have to wait long to find out.