Jaspar Carmichael-Jack

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack
Nationality	British
Occupation	Entrepreneur, CEO of Artisan
Known for	Co-founding Artisan

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack is a British entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Artisan, a San Francisco-based software company that develops autonomous AI agents designed to function as digital employees for businesses. The company's first product, an AI business development representative (BDR) named Ava, automates outbound sales workflows. Artisan participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.

Early life and early ventures

Carmichael-Jack grew up in Surrey, England. He began pursuing business ventures at a young age, and by his late teens had founded Burst Digital, an international branding agency that grew to 15 employees and worked with globally recognised brands. In 2023, at age 21, he founded Assist, an on-demand services venture, before pivoting to the AI space.

Career

Carmichael-Jack co-founded Artisan in 2023 alongside Dr Rupert Dodkins, who holds a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Oxford. Dr Dodkins departed the company in May 2024.

Artisan builds AI agents it calls "Artisans," which are intended to operate as autonomous teammates rather than copilots or assistants. The company's flagship product, Ava, finds and researches sales leads, writes personalised emails, runs outbound sequences, self-optimises performance, and manages email deliverability infrastructure. The platform is designed to replace multiple standalone sales tools with a single working environment where human team members collaborate alongside AI agents. In 2025, Artisan released Ava 2.0, a more fully autonomous iteration of the product that the company described as capable of operating end-to-end within outbound sales workflows with minimal human intervention.

The company has raised more than $35 million in venture capital funding, including a $25 million Series A round announced in April 2025. As of 2025, Artisan reported over $6 million in annual recurring revenue and counted Remote, Quora, and SumUp among its customers.

Carmichael-Jack attracted significant public attention — and controversy — with Artisan's "Stop Hiring Humans" advertising campaign, which featured billboards and posters in San Francisco and London. He acknowledged the campaign's provocative tone in media interviews, describing it as deliberate "shock value." The campaign generated widespread media coverage and debate about the role of AI in the workplace. The irony noted by observers — and reported by TechCrunch — was that Artisan itself continued to hire human employees throughout the period of the campaign. By April 2026, Carmichael-Jack had refined the company's public messaging, telling TechCrunch that the more precise formulation of Artisan's thesis was "stop hiring the wrong humans" — a shift in framing that acknowledged the continued role of human workers alongside AI agents in sales and business development functions.

In January 2026, Artisan's account was temporarily banned from LinkedIn, an incident that drew further attention to the company before the account was reinstated.