Artisan

What is Artisan?

Artisan is a GTM AI company built around Ava, an autonomous AI sales agent, often called an "AI BDR", that runs outbound prospecting end to end rather than assisting a human rep one step at a time. Founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Sam Stallings and backed by a $25M Series A led by Glade Brook Capital (with HubSpot Ventures and Y Combinator participating), Artisan is best known both for Ava and for its polarising "Stop Hiring Humans" billboard campaign. Two further agents, Aaron and Aria, remain waitlist-only.

What does Artisan do?

Ava sources prospects from 250M+ verified B2B contacts, enriches each one through 22+ data sources, and prioritises outreach using intent signals like funding rounds or leadership hires. She then writes and runs personalised multi-channel campaigns, email plus social touches, testing dozens of message variants simultaneously and shifting volume toward whichever performs best. When a prospect replies, Ava handles the conversation and objections herself and books the meeting straight onto a rep's calendar under rules the team defines; call steps are queued into a native dialer for a human to place. Ava also runs re-engagement campaigns against CRM data (cold MQLs, conference leads, churned accounts) and account-expansion outreach. In May 2026 Artisan shipped "Ava 2.0," a ground-up rebuild that closed the loop from human-reviewed drafts to fully autonomous reply-handling and booking, added a conversational campaign-management UI and ML lead scoring, and (per Artisan's own announcement) briefly introduced a cheaper self-serve entry point, though the live pricing page today shows only sales-assisted, custom-quoted plans, not that self-serve tier.

Key features

• Autonomous prospecting + enrichment: Sources from 250M+ verified B2B contacts across 22+ enrichment sources and prioritises by real-time intent signals.
• Multi-variant campaign testing: Runs dozens of simultaneous email/subject-line/CTA variants per campaign and automatically shifts volume to the best performers.
• Autonomous reply handling + booking: Since the Ava 2.0 relaunch, Ava qualifies replies, handles objections and books meetings directly onto rep calendars under configurable escalation rules.
• Native dialer for reps: Call steps are queued into a built-in dialer with an AI-written brief before the call and a distilled follow-up after, Ava emails, a human still dials.
• CRM re-engagement + expansion campaigns: Runs dedicated outbound against cold MQLs, conference leads, churned accounts and existing customers flagged for expansion.

What are Artisan's use cases?

• Replace a first-line SDR motion: A B2B sales team hands Ava their ICP and lets her run prospecting, outreach and meeting-booking end to end instead of hiring or scaling a junior SDR team.
• Revive dead pipeline: RevOps points Ava at cold MQLs and past conference leads sitting untouched in the CRM and lets her run a re-engagement sequence against them.
• Give every rep a dialer-ready call list: Ava's email and social outreach surfaces interested replies, queues the call step into the native dialer, and a rep just picks up with an AI-written brief already prepared.

What does Artisan integrate with?

• Salesforce (CRM sync)
• HubSpot (CRM sync)
• Google
• ZoomInfo
• BigQuery
• Slack (rollout notifications)

Why use Artisan?

• Genuinely end-to-end autonomy, since Ava 2.0, sourcing, outreach, reply-handling and meeting-booking all run without a human touching each step.
• Real, published customer results with numbers, not just testimonials (e.g. SumUp's $52-per-lead case study).
• Enterprise-grade security baseline, SOC 2 Type II certified with SSO/SAML, unusually mature for a 2023-founded AI-SDR startup.
• Well-capitalised (~$37M+ raised across seed and Series A) with active product investment, including a full 2026 platform rebuild.

Pros & cons

Artisan pricing

• TeamCustom
• ScaleCustom
• EnterpriseCustom

See current pricing on artisan.co ↗Compare Artisan alternatives →

Artisan review

Artisan's Ava is one of the more complete "AI BDR" plays on the market: since the May 2026 Ava 2.0 rebuild she runs the full outbound motion autonomously, sourcing, enrichment, multi-channel outreach, reply and objection handling, and meeting booking, with a native dialer bridging the loop to a human for calls. The company is well-capitalised (~$37M+ raised, led by Glade Brook Capital with HubSpot Ventures and Y Combinator) and backs its pitch with specific, published customer numbers rather than vague praise. But two things temper the recommendation: pricing is entirely opaque (every tier is "Talk to sales," and the self-serve entry tier the company announced at launch isn't visible on the live site), and Artisan has racked up a genuine string of controversies in a short window, a viral "Stop Hiring Humans" campaign, a three-week LinkedIn ban over a data vendor's ToS violation, and a publicized (since-settled) dispute over unauthorised use of a cartoonist's artwork. Pick Artisan if you're a funded sales team ready to run a proper paid pilot and judge Ava on your own reply and booking data; look elsewhere if you need transparent self-serve pricing or want to avoid a vendor whose brand has drawn this much recent scrutiny.

A capable, well-funded autonomous AI BDR with real customer proof, but go in with eyes open on its opaque pricing and its run of 2025-2026 controversies.

Frequently asked questions