Artisan AI’s response to the backlash to its controversial “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign? Let them eat cake.
A week ago, the company, whose provocative 2024 billboard campaign sparked outrage across San Francisco, New York, and London, sent customized sheet cakes to 20 startups around the city, generating modest buzz online.
The cakes, which the team ordered from SusieCakes, were customized with the same AI-generated “employee” that appeared on the billboards and bus stop ads — looking as uncannily symmetrical as ever, but this time sans lasers shooting from her eyes — alongside a quippy line of copy: “It’s time to hire Ava, the market leading AI BDR. She’ll make doing outbound a piece of cake!”
Tina Sang, Artisan’s chief of staff and head of growth, said the cake campaign was not a direct response to last year’s backlash, but it is part of their new marketing strategy to move away from ragebaiting while still getting the company name out there.
“[The cake campaign] strikes the right balance between, it’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s engaging, it’s very friendly, and like, very neutral,” Sang said. “We definitely want to start shifting away from ‘Stop hiring humans’ to something that’s a little more human-centric, especially as we mature as a company.”
Sweet.
Artisan’s maturity has certainly been questioned by critics. CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack recently turned 24 and founded the company when he was 21. Sang, who is also 24 and lives in a Russian Hill apartment-workspace with Carmichael-Jack and CPO Sam Stallings, said the “Stop hiring humans” headline was deliberately provocative but everyone in the company thought it was obviously “tongue-in-cheek” and “ironic.”
The intensity of the response, which included death threats sent to Carmichael-Jack, surprised the small team.
“Everyone was a little rattled by just how violent the comments were. After that there was a period where everyone was a little bit on edge,” Sang said. “We expected there to be negative backlash, but you don’t know what will really happen until you actually put it out there.”
(For anyone wondering, Sang said the oldest employee is their CTO Ming Li, who is in his 40s, and the average age of the company is “probably early 30s.”)
Despite the negative headlines, Artisan’s product is, as AI platforms go, relatively tame: It is a software-as-a-service platform that uses a combination of large language models, including ChatGPT, so businesses can automate cold sales outreach. In the wake of the billboard campaign, Carmichael-Jack started several AMA threads on Reddit in what appeared to be an attempt to backpedal the vitriol his trolling billboards purposefully stirred. (First response from a Redditor: “Oh hi, fuck you.”)
On one of those threads, Carmichael-Jack admitted that Artisan “just does outbound sales over LinkedIn and email” and responded to a user’s suggestion that Artisan is nothing more than “a fancy OpenAI wrapper” with a playful shushing face emoji, perhaps suggesting that such an evaluation may not be so off-base.
With such a straightforward product, Sang said the viral campaign was necessary and ultimately successful: It cut through the noise in a market crowded with similar AI startups using similar advertising buzzwords, generating a billion online impressions and “a direct upshoot in the number of leads that came inbound as well.”
Still, building a brand associated with gimmickry, at best, or tone-deafness, at worst, does not always pay off: The publicity has not gained the Artisan team much access in the tech world.
For the cake campaign, Sang and her team first sent LinkedIn messages to the companies they knew they could reach, what she called “more viral and hacky” AI startups, including Delve, Exa, and Pylon. They also were able to send cakes to a few more mature startups like Brex, but Sang said connecting with founders they already knew in the Y Combinator community was more successful.
“It was a lot easier to walk up to their door and send them the gift,” Sang said. “It was definitely harder to reach companies at the enterprise level. There’s a lot more security, a lot more people in the office, and we didn’t necessarily know who to send those to.”
Sang said the team did not use their own product for the cold outreach, the very thing Ava supposedly does better than a human.
“Ava works better at scale,” Sang said.
For a smaller, stickier campaign — like unsolicited cake deliveries — humans still cut it.
