‘It’s just shock value,’ says CEO behind ‘Stop Hiring Humans’ ads

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — The CEO of a San Francisco AI startup that’s billboards went viral for telling people to “Stop Hiring Humans,” admitted the campaign was intentionally meant to be triggering. Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the co-founder and CEO or Artisan, spoke on a panel on “The Pros and Cons of Hiring AI agents as Early Employees” on Wednesday, the final day of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.

The startup’s “Stop Hiring Human” marketing campaign, which advertises its product, an AI sales agent dubbed, “Ava,” went viral — and not in a positive way — when it first popped up on San Francisco bus shelters and billboard late last year. Recently, the campaign received national attention when a picture of one of billboards was tweeted out by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

“Billboards across the country are promoting the replacement of millions of jobs with AI and robotics,” Sanders tweeted. “Great idea. One simple question: How will those displaced workers survive when there are no jobs or income for them?”

“I would say, thank you very much for the free sponsored post,” Carmichael-Jack joked when asked about Sanders’ tweet.

“AI in its current state, if it continues on the current track it will create more jobs than it will take,” he added on a more serious note.

“It’s shock value,” he admitted when further pressed on the provocative campaign.

The shock value has apparently paid off for Artisan.

In August, the company announced it had raised $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capitol, which counts Perplexity, Stripe and SpaceX among its portfolio.

But amid the success, the CEO admitted there had been backlash.

“We get a lot of backlash. We kind of deserved it with our marketing,” he joked.

Artisan, which Carmichael-Jack said recently unveiled a new ad boasting its agents “won’t get caught cheating on a kiss cam with the head of HR,” is also working on an updated version of its Ava product. Ava 2.0, according to Carmichael-Jack, will be more like a human employee.

“You’ll be able to talk to her on Slack,” he told the audience at TechCrunch.

Carmichael-Jack also admitted that their are limitations to the current generation of AI products.

“You don’t want to use AI for any task where you need 100% confidence,” he said. “If you’re at a lower risk where maybe 99.9% accuracy is enough,” he said, adding that “if you’re dealing with the nuclear launch codes, maybe don’t use AI.”

Surprisingly, for the CEO of a company that’s made its name with a marketing campaign about AI replacing humans, Carmichael-Jack remains bearish on the prospects of AI actually replacing humans. Instead, he said the technology would be “taking over mundane jobs that humans don’t really enjoy doing.”

But what it we do achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), the level of AI the technology’s doomsayers warn could wipe out most, if not all, jobs?

“I think in the abstract scenario where we actually achieve AGI, which isn’t realistic with current technologies, that would mean inherently that we would need UBI (universal basic income),” he said. “If we were to have AGI, you would need UBI alongside of that.”

“But we’re far away from that now,” he added.