Over the past few days, several posts on the LinkedIn and Twitter/X went viral when one of the most talked about AI companies in San Francisco suddenly disappeared from LinkedIn: Artisan AI.
The company’s LinkedIn page, individual employee profiles, and executive posts display a “This post cannot be displayed” message.
The startup had been blocked from the site, Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack confirmed to TechCrunch. However, after working with LinkedIn for the past two weeks — and addressing the social network’s concerns — Artisan is now on the mend.
“Every startup inevitably has something that comes back to bite it [from things] who do it early,” Carmichael-Jack said.
Contrary to rumors in the viral posts, LinkedIn did not ban the company because its AI agents were spamming users. But LinkedIn objected to the startup using the LinkedIn name on its website and also claimed the company was using data brokers who had scraped the site without permission, Carmichael-Jack said. Data scraping is a Violation of LinkedIn Terms of Service.
Artisan AI is a graduate of startup accelerator Y Combinator and has become one of San Francisco’s busiest startups through the “Stop Hiring People” billboards posted around the city. Artisan offers an AI agent it calls Ava that performs outbound sales by finding and contacting potential customers. LinkedIn is famously valuable turf for outbound marketers — both human and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
While some LinkedIn users seemed to notice Banning Artisan about a week agothe posts and tweets about it really picked up steam this week.
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Carmichael-Jack explained that “LinkedIn’s enforcement team contacted us and they basically banned our accounts completely, so we disappeared from the platform while they were looking into it, which wasn’t ideal. But it was kind of funny, because once we got banned, our lead flow suddenly started increasing every day. And I think it was obvious that there were so many of them.”
As a founder who likes a good guerilla marketing plan, he joked, “I wish we had done it on purpose.”
The truth was, she was shocked when she received an email from LinkedIn on the evening of Friday, December 19, right before the Christmas break. Carmichael-Jack described the team that handled the ban as helpful and responsive, even if they were also anonymous and accessible only by email.
To appease LinkedIn, Artisan has removed all references to LinkedIn from its website. It was using the name to compare some of its data capabilities to LinkedIn’s. The CEO also got a crash course in verifying third-party vendors, making sure his data partners were operating in accordance with LinkedIn policies.
While Carmichael-Jack is happy to be back at the Microsoft-owned social network, he downplayed how damaging the startup would be, saying very little of the data Artisan uses comes from the site. It is also about to release a new version of the agent that is more autonomous and can use more channels to contact potential customers.
“We can deal with anything. We’re launching the call as a channel in a couple of months — outbound calls,” so if LinkedIn’s ban couldn’t be reversed, “it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he said.
Interestingly, LinkedIn is not a direct competitor. It launched its first AI agent last year he is called Recruiting Assistantbut focuses on recruiting. However, the fact that LinkedIn went nuclear for Artisan could signal that a sales rep could one day be in the works as well. LinkedIn did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
In any case, Artisan’s very public ban can be seen as a warning to all players looking for data sources: Big Tech is watching.
