“Stop Hiring Humans!”
Out of the hundreds of booths at TechCrunch Disrupt, the don’t-hire-people message from Artisan generated the most heat. In fact, I want to applaud the San Francisco AI company for taking such a risky gamble by saying out loud what people always suspected was being said in a quiet voice about the AI revolution: stop paying people. Let AI do the dirty work and, eventually, all the work.
Artisan’s AI call to arms was broadcast in a you-can’t-miss-it gigantic purple sign with three AI-generated avatars. Each time I passed, people took pictures, but not many stuck around to learn about “consolidated software powered by artisans.”
Why?
Perhaps it was self-defense. I suspect even people in tech worry about AI taking their jobs. Even for the AI generation, this campaign was just too on the nose and too close for comfort.
It could also be that the offering wasn’t going to be a hit with a crowd of would-be founders. Artisan was promoting an AI business development representative (BDR) to help with sales. Many of these companies have yet to think about their sales stack in such a fashion.
But “founder mode” definitely was focused on money—so much so that the Mercury booth next to Artisan had crowds at capacity. Mercury sells banking and credit cards “engineered for the startup journey.” Compared to Artisan, Mercury exerted a gravitational pull worthy of a black hole.
I thought about those two extremes as I strolled the expo hall with my friend, journalist, and “AI Curious” podcaster Jeff Wilser. Either the booths were in your face in a way that might make you feel uncomfortable (more on that soon), or they were so generic that we didn’t know if they were appealing to consumers, decision-makers, investors or TechCrunch itself. For example, we couldn’t help but notice how many company booths claimed they were – wait for it, wait for it – disrupting the very market they were entering. How on the money for a trade show called Disrupt!
In a field of tech startups vying for attention, the gimmicks that stayed with me weren’t technological but rather homespun.
Two French guys held up cardboard signs in their own handwriting that declared: “AI agents suck.” While not nearly as provocative as Artisan’s gamble, the guys from Memetix were not willing to let you simply pass them by. In the best guerilla style, they insisted on talking to you about how their AI agents saved time.
Meanwhile, a section dedicated to family planning and sexuality made me blush. Dr. Jennifer Hintzsche, Ph.D, got my attention, not because of her impressive credentials but her willingness to dress as a giant… sperm!
As I kept giggling like a teenager, she shared her story about how she was diagnosed in 2017 with unexplained infertility. “As a Ph.D. cancer research scientist and biologist, ‘unexplained infertility’ was an unacceptable diagnosis.”
Her story is the best of start-up lore, solving an “unsolvable” problem that had ramifications for everyone: “My ‘infertile’ diagnosis meant my insurance wouldn’t cover treatment. So I set out to use my Ph.D. in biology to dig through the scientific research to find answers. I found a non-invasive option called intracervical insemination that had the same live birth rate as IUI when done sterilely in the clinic. So why couldn’t I try this at home? It didn’t exist. So we made it.”
Within two months of use, she conceived her daughter, Lois.
Whether Lois will get a job when she’s an adult is another matter.
If Artisan and the AI Chicken Littles are right, humans might be first unemployed before they’re extinct.
But, if Lois is anything like her mother, she is not going to take “no” for an answer, even if it’s from Mother Nature or AI. In fact, she’s going to use her education to engineer her way out of her problem – and help others along the way, which gives me hope for the next generation of entrepreneurs, and people as well.
