Is their product good enough to back their hype? Probably not. Most of these "customer service" systems are only slightly smarter than "Press 1 to pay your bill, press 2 if your item hasn't arrived..." menu systems.
Edit: It's worse than I thought. It's a spamming system.
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Like most chatbot companies, their own sales effort does not use their own chatbot. When you go to their site, you don't get to talk to their chatbot about their product.
There’s so many of these sales engagement products that the only way to stand out it seems is to be the loudest. Many of these companies also spam a lot of Reddits with fake reviews. Not a novel concept, here’s a bunch more:
Reply.io
Lemlist
Apollo.io
Smartlead
Instantly
Saleshandy
Quickmail
Salesforge
Snov
Outreach
There’s a new one every day because the last one got banned/isn’t effective anymore. There’s a ton of leads agencies that gobble these up sending out tens of thousands of emails every day using the latest incarnation of this spamware, creating new domains and warming them up with fake emails to each other and now using LLMs to “personalize” the emails (i.e. the “AI”) all in the attempt to evade spam filters. I get several of such emails every other day shilling their agency.
If you've gotten cold or recruiter emails in the last few years where it looks like the person is just talking to themselves in your inbox with 6 different follow ups, it's probably thanks to one of these tools.
> I used this “AI” for my company about 6 months ago.
> We had to cancel after only two months because it kept making things up that weren’t easily checked. Ex. I noticed your company recently bought xx I think that was a savvy move
> Cue people asking me what I was referring to, where they could find an article, etc
> These unanswerable questions were all the responses I ever got back. The effective response rate was 0%. So not only was it not producing it was also actively hurting the brand with all the nonsensical comments.
Remember that Y Combinator frequently brags they don’t back ideas, they back founders. Meaning this is the type of asshole they think is a good bet. Another one whose best idea they could come up with was yet another shitty chatbot. Because that’s all Y Combinator seems to back these days: “something something AI”.
If you want to double-down on the sketchiness of selling robo-plagiarism of human authors' creations, to put humans out of work, call it "Artisans".
We all know that a bunch of people are getting rich off massive copyright violation, and anyone who understands how sketchy it is would rather be one of the people getting rich, than to martyr themselves pointlessly in front of this freight train of thieving greed.
But go and call it "Artisans", just to add insult to world-crushing injury.
> We all know that a bunch of people are getting rich off massive copyright violation, and anyone who understands how sketchy it is would rather be one of the people getting rich, than to martyr themselves pointlessly in front of this freight train of thieving greed.
This verbalises something I had been thinking about for a long time, and resonates deeply. Thank you. It’s all so darn bleak…
Because my sick elderly dad needs to be in constant contact with doctors and care providers on a nearly daily basis. We can't afford to miss a phone call that may cause a delay to getting help, medication, or a procedure. Most of these offices don't use their actual numbers on outgoing calls, so it's hard to know what is a spam call or a call from another different provider or another provider's office. Unfortunately, this means I have to answer the phone for every call that comes in. These junk calls add so much stress and interruption to my life. There are at least 8-10 junk calls per day. So I'm interrupted from my full time job, or the job of caring for my father at least once an hour every single day.
You believe that if you got a call from an AI bot selling you something you’d believe it to be human long enough to go through with the purchase? How many bridges are you looking to buy?
> The company, which is backed by startup accelerator Y-Combinator, sells what it calls “AI Employees” or “Artisans.” What the company actually sells is software designed to assist with customer service and sales workflow.
"Humans Need Not Apply", as CGP Grey titled one of his videos.
For the moment, it is not so; for the moment, AI needs a human around to prevent catastrophic mistakes.
When it no longer needs that help, then humans need no longer apply.
> "Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance" "Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today." "Hire Artisans, not humans." "The era of AI employees is here." Yes, grim stuff. At first glance, you might wonder who the target audience for these billboards is. After all, the billboards will mostly be viewed by humans, and, as far as can be discerned, most humans enjoy being employed.
Do we? I rather had the impression most of us like money, and the work is just the means to get that money?
What all these AI crazies forget is that they're building a world with no customers.
If no stupid humans have jobs no stupid humans won't have money to buy whatever these Magical AI companies are selling.
“… What if we burn all our funding to create a shocking antisocial marketing campaign that gets the press to talk about our unknown startup, because the air is already saturated with breathless AI hype”
Tell me you haven't been out of the Bay Area in a long time without telling me you haven't been out of the Bay Area in a long time. What a tone-deaf campaign.
Made them much more efficient, reliable, and greatly improved quality control.
I get the point you're trying to make and I think AI right now is mostly hot garbage, but physical automation has drastically improved the quality of so many products we use today. Cars are safer partially because the robots are so much better at building cars.
Do you have a source on this? I am aware the auto industry is highly automated and robots outperform humans at a lot of the manual labor, but the word "partially" is hand-waving away a lot of big shifts in industrial engineering and national regulations. It just seems difficult to disentangle. (E.g. it is difficult for shops to automate until they get their systems in logistical order, and a low-regulation environment might encourage a race-to-the-bottom of pushing cheap robots way too hard and ignoring QC failures.)
Edit: It's worse than I thought. It's a spamming system.
Artisan Is The Only Outbound Tool Your Team Needs
Ava operates within Artisan Sales, our platform that has everything you need for cold outbound. B2B data, warmup, automated lead research, bounce testing, deliverability checks and so much more.
Like most chatbot companies, their own sales effort does not use their own chatbot. When you go to their site, you don't get to talk to their chatbot about their product.