San Francisco billboards right now: Artisan.co’s “Ava” AI with “Stop Hiring Humans.” Not “make team productive” - just “replace workers.”
Outset.ai hit back: “Artisan’s Ava is a cautionary tale” and “Humans > Machines.”
This is happening blocks from my apartment. It pisses me off.
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The Problem
Artisan’s core pitch is brutally simple: fire all your SDRs, buy our AI instead, and dramatically save money since AI agents don’t need healthcare benefits, never negotiate for higher salaries, and aren’t actually humans requiring dignity or consideration.
From a pure marketing perspective, it’s extremely effective because it scares managers into thinking they’re falling behind their competitors and creates genuine urgency to act quickly before they lose competitive advantage.
But it’s also profoundly shortsighted, deeply irresponsible, and fundamentally wrong as a societal approach to AI adoption.
It’s not wrong because AI genuinely can’t handle sales outreach effectively, because it absolutely can do that specific task. It’s wrong because framing AI as a wholesale replacement for humans instead of as a powerful tool makes everything measurably worse for literally everyone involved.
Augmentation vs Replacement
The replacement mindset says: “AI can do everything a human does in this role but substantially cheaper, so just fire the human and pocket the savings.”
The augmentation mindset says: “AI can handle the repetitive mechanical parts of the job efficiently, which frees up the human to focus their valuable time and attention on what actually matters and requires judgment.”
I personally use Claude every single day to help me write better code faster, organize my scattered thoughts more clearly, and explore complex ideas more quickly than I could alone. It doesn’t replace me or make me obsolete, it genuinely makes me better and more capable.
For sales specifically, AI can efficiently send 1,000 personalized outreach emails at scale, while humans excel at building genuine relationships with the 10 qualified leads that actually matter. The intelligent approach is using AI for the high-volume mechanical first part, and irreplaceable humans for the relationship-building second part.
Real Cost of Job Replacement
Workers are understandably terrified: They’re absolutely right to be scared when companies are literally bragging about not hiring humans, because what happens to all the people who still need jobs to pay rent and feed their families?
Product quality inevitably suffers over time: Sales isn’t just mechanically sending emails at volume, it’s genuinely understanding customer pain points, adapting your approach based on feedback, and patiently building trust over multiple interactions. You can replace your entire sales team with AI and maybe hit your metrics short-term by maintaining email volume, but long-term customers will absolutely notice they’re talking to emotionless robots rather than humans who actually care.
Innovation grinds to a halt: When companies obsessively focus on cutting costs by systematically firing people rather than investing in building genuinely better products, you’re racing to the bottom rather than innovating toward the future.
Society fractures along class lines: Not everyone can realistically become a prompt engineer or AI trainer, most people still need regular stable jobs with decent pay to build normal lives. If we aggressively replace existing jobs with AI without simultaneously creating substantial new employment opportunities, we’re creating massive societal problems we’ll all have to deal with.
Some jobs absolutely will disappear, that’s true of every major technological shift throughout history. But actively celebrating that displacement? Marketing job elimination as your primary product feature? That’s categorically different and deeply troubling.
Responsible Marketing
How about marketing messages like “Ava handles cold outreach automatically so your sales team can focus their valuable time on actually closing deals”?
Or “Let AI handle the repetitive mechanical work so your team can focus on creative problem-solving that actually requires human judgment”?
Or simply “Augment your team’s capabilities with AI, don’t replace them entirely”?
It’s literally the exact same underlying technology, just with completely different framing, and that makes a hugely different societal impact.
Why This Matters
I build products with AI professionally, I’m genuinely bullish on its transformative potential, but I’m also realistic about what happens when we optimize purely for short-term efficiency without seriously considering the broader human impact of our decisions.
If Artisan’s dystopian vision wins where companies proudly replace workers and openly brag about it, then fewer people will have meaningful opportunities to build things that matter, learn valuable skills through work, and contribute real value to society. That world genuinely sucks for most people even if the AI technology works absolutely perfectly from a technical perspective.
Anthropic’s Approach
When Anthropic talks about “AI safety” they mean building AI systems that genuinely make society better as a whole, not just marginally more efficient at extracting profit. That means creating tools that help people do their existing jobs better rather than ruthlessly eliminating those jobs entirely, maintaining transparency about real limitations rather than overpromising capabilities, designing systems that enhance human agency rather than accelerating obsolescence, and seriously thinking through second-order societal effects before shipping products at scale.
This isn’t being anti-progress or resisting technological advancement. This is being pro-thoughtful-progress that considers human welfare.
What Happens Next
In the short-term, Artisan’s provocative billboards will probably work as marketing. Companies will buy Ava, aggressively fire their SDRs, achieve lower operational costs, and maintain roughly the same email volume metrics.
But long-term, my confident bet is that companies intelligently using AI to augment human capabilities will consistently beat companies crudely using AI to replace humans entirely. Humans bring irreplaceable judgment about nuanced situations, genuine empathy for customer problems, creative problem-solving that breaks established patterns, and authentic relationships that create lasting loyalty. The best companies will strategically combine both approaches where AI provides scale and speed while humans provide nuance and genuine connection.
Companies going all-in on wholesale human replacement will eventually hit a hard ceiling on quality and growth. That “Stop Hiring Humans” slogan wasn’t visionary leadership, it was just myopic short-sighted cost-cutting dressed up with provocative marketing.
My Take
Absolutely use AI tools daily. Build ambitious products with AI capabilities. Get dramatically better at your work with AI assistance.
But don’t celebrate replacing people as if it’s progress. Don’t market job elimination as your primary value proposition. Don’t cynically frame human obsolescence as exciting innovation.
AI should fundamentally make us more capable as humans, not make us less necessary to the economic system. That’s the crucial difference between a tool that empowers and a threat that displaces.
Outset’s counter-billboards are completely right with their message that Humans > Machines. Not because machines can’t do impressive things, they obviously can. But because humans should still fundamentally matter even when machines become capable of doing more.