Over the past few days, several posts on LinkedIn and Twitter/X have gone viral after Artisan AI, one of San Francisco’s most talked-about AI companies, suddenly disappeared from LinkedIn.
The company’s LinkedIn page, each employee’s profile, and posts from executives all displayed the message “This post cannot be viewed.”
Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack confirmed to TechCrunch that the startup had been banned from the site. However, after working with LinkedIn over the past two weeks to address the social network’s concerns, Artisan is now back.
“Every startup always has some problem that comes back to haunt them. [from things] They’re doing it early on,” Carmichael Jack said.
Contrary to rumors of a viral post, LinkedIn did not ban the company because its AI agent was spamming users. But Carmichael Jack said LinkedIn objected to the startup’s use of the LinkedIn name on its website and claimed that the company used data brokers who scraped the site without permission. Data scraping is against LinkedIn’s Terms of Service.
Artisan AI is an alumnus of startup accelerator Y Combinator that has become one of San Francisco’s hottest startups through “Stop Hiring Humans” signs plastered all over the city. Artisan offers an AI agent called Ava that performs outbound sales by finding and contacting potential customers. LinkedIn is famously a valuable turf for outbound marketing salespeople (both human and, increasingly, AI).
Several LinkedIn users apparently became aware of Artisan’s ban about a week ago, and posts and tweets about it have become very active this week.
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Carmichael Jack said LinkedIn’s “enforcement team contacted us and they basically completely restricted our account, so we disappeared from the platform while they reviewed it, which is not ideal. But it was kind of funny because once we got restricted, the lead flow suddenly started increasing a little bit every day. And I think that’s because obviously so many people were posting about it.
As a founder who loves a good guerrilla marketing scheme, he joked, “I wish I had done it on purpose.”
The truth is, he was shocked to receive an email from LinkedIn on the evening of Friday, Dec. 19, just before the Christmas break. Carmichael-Jack said the team dealing with the ban had been helpful and responsive, even though they could only be contacted anonymously by email.
To appease LinkedIn, Artisan removed all references to LinkedIn from its website. The company used its name to compare some of its data features to those of LinkedIn. The CEO also took a crash course in third-party vendor verification to ensure data partners were operating in compliance with LinkedIn’s policies.
Carmichael-Jack said he was happy to be back on the Microsoft-owned social network, but downplayed how damaging the launch would be, saying most of the data Artisan uses doesn’t come from the site. He is also releasing a new version of agents that is more autonomous and allows more channels to contact prospects.
“We can get away with anything. We’re going to launch Dial as a channel in a few months, so outbound calls.” So even if the LinkedIn ban couldn’t be reversed, “it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he said.
Interestingly, LinkedIn is not a direct competitor. The company, which launched its first AI agent called Hiring Assistant last year, is focused on recruiting. Still, LinkedIn’s nuke of Artisan could be a sign that distributors could also join that pipeline someday. 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 agent players looking for data sources. Big Tech is taking notice.
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