Member-only story
Branding
When the Artisan Is Artificial
Can we still call it craft if the work is automated?
“STOP HIRING HUMANS” read the billboards scattered around San Francisco’s more tech-friendly districts. They’ve been paid for by a startup called Artisan, a word not usually associated with robots. Artisan was founded in 2023 by a team of “incredible talent from Stanford, Oxford, Meta, IBM, and more” — the company’s self-description, in case you were wondering — that’s “united by the passion for completely revolutionizing the way we work.” The company’s founder, UK-born Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, is 23 years old.
Some of Artisan’s billboards feature a large image of “Ava the AI BDR,” eyes aglow with creepy laser intensity. Writing for Creative Bloq, reporter Natalie Fear — an apt surname in this case — called these ads “bizarre” and “a dystopian nightmare.”
I can’t speak to the ads’ effectiveness, although I suppose there’s still some truth to the axiom that all publicity, even the shuddering-in-horror kind, is good publicity. My interest lies in the company name and what it signifies.
Artisan once meant, and in most quarters still signifies, a craftsperson, especially one using traditional or non-mechanized methods. In the Middle Ages, artisans organized themselves into guilds that set…