[Andrew] Artisan’s AI Sales Revolution: Bold Bets, Bumps, and Big Backers

Jaspar Carmichael Jack, the 23-year-old founder of AI sales startup Artisan, has had a whirlwind year. From provocative marketing campaigns to securing major venture capital funding, the company has made waves in the tech world. This article traces Artisan’s journey — from its rocky beginnings and bold experiments to its current growth and future plans.[Editor’s Note]

It has been a wild year so far for the 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael Jack, the entrepreneur behind Artisan — a startup trying to use AI to automate certain sales jobs. This week alone, Artisan revealed that they have closed Series A funding of $25 million, led by Glade Brook Capital, with other heavyweights like Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, and Day One Ventures joining in.

Not too shabby for a company that was still in Y Combinator’s winter class 2024 just last year. Artisan started making waves with their outrageously bold ad campaign: “Stop Hiring Humans.” Yes, really. It even led Carmichael-Jack to receive death threats, and on April Fools’ Day, he posted a notice announcing that he was quitting and being replaced by an AI CEO (He’s still the CEO, don’t worry — he was joking).

The Early Days Weren’t Perfect
Like most new technology, there were bugs in the first iteration. Artisan’s flagship product, a bot salesperson called Ava, used to spit out awful cold emails — awful enough that customers simply dropped the product altogether. Carmichael-Jack described it as cringe and admitted openly that the AI previously “hallucinated” facts (made facts up).
But the firm partnered with Anthropic to fix it, and nowadays, Artisan states Ava only mistakenly sends 1 in 10,000 emails. They even developed a workflow where companies forward Ava all of the important data first, so she doesn’t have to take an educated guess.
Now, Artisan boasts 250 clients and makes $5 million each year in repeat business.

Still Hiring Humans
Even though the ads claimed to “stop hiring humans,” Artisan’s workers actually include 35 real humans, and they’re hiring 22 more. The whole concept, according to Carmichael-Jack, isn’t replacing people but augmenting human work with some help from AI.
And they continue to test. They’re also creating two new AI agents — Aaron, to handle incoming messages, and Aria, essentially a genius meeting manager. They’re both coming out before 2025’s end.

Lessons Learned
Artisan learned that not all companies are right for AI-generated sales. Some companies were given way too many low-quality leads, while others were not given enough leads at all. Now, they’re pickier about who they sell to. They even let customers leave early if it’s not working.
To make things simple, they’re trying out a new “pay per result” model with something called Paid.ai — so customers only pay when they actually get good leads.
Carmichael-Jack summed it up quite nicely: “We should only really be selling to people if they get value from the product.”