From Stop Hiring Humans to Be More Human

About this episode

Artisan's earlier Stop Hiring Humans campaign put the company on the map. But founder and CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack says the message didn't fit all its customers: enterprise sales teams were using Ava to help their existing people do more. Inside Artisan, he says the team is around 50 people, despite earlier plans to grow beyond 100. And some employees' AI token bills became large enough that hiring another person could have been cheaper.

The practical question is which work AI can do reliably and at a sensible cost. Jaspar explains why Artisan stepped back from maximizing token use to focus on return on investment, why product judgment and knowledge of a customer's workflow still matter when building gets easier, and where human salespeople remain essential. He also describes the next step beyond outbound prospecting, with an AI account executive intended for smaller deals that would otherwise go straight to self-service.

Chapters

Guest

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Founder & CEO at Artisan.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaspar-carmichael-jack/
Artisan: https://www.artisan.co/

About the show

Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.
More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/

About the host

Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards, a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/
X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris