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.

“Interview Ava, the AI BDR [business development representative].” Photo: Nancy Friedman.

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…