In recent days, several articles on LinkedIn And Twitter/X went viral after 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 all displayed a “This post cannot be displayed” message.
The startup had been banned from the site, Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack confirmed to TechCrunch. However, after working with LinkedIn over the past two weeks – and addressing the social network’s concerns – Artisan has now been reinstated.
“Every startup inevitably has some sort of thing that comes back to bite them [from things] what they do from the beginning,” Carmichael-Jack said.
Contrary to what was rumored in the viral posts, LinkedIn did not ban the company because its AI agents were spamming users. LinkedIn, however, objected to the startup using the LinkedIn name on its website and also alleged that the company used data brokers who scraped the site without authorization, Carmichael-Jack said. Data scraping is a violation of LinkedIn terms of service.
Artisan AI graduated from startup accelerator Y Combinator and became one of San Francisco’s hottest startups via its “Stop Hiring Humans” billboards posted around the city. Artisan offers an AI agent called Ava that conducts outbound sales by finding and contacting potential customers. LinkedIn is renowned for being valuable ground for outbound marketing salespeople – both human and, increasingly, AI.
While a few LinkedIn users seemed to notice Ban on artisans about a week agoTHE posts And tweets on this topic really picked up steam this week.
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Carmichael-Jack explained that “LinkedIn’s enforcement team contacted us and completely restricted our accounts, so we disappeared from the platform while they looked into it, which wasn’t ideal. But it was kind of funny, because once we got restricted, our lead flow suddenly started increasing 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 program, he joked, “I wish we did that on purpose.” »
The truth is, he was shocked to receive an email from LinkedIn on Friday evening, December 19, just before the Christmas break. Carmichael-Jack described the team handling the ban as helpful and responsive, although they were also anonymous and reachable only by email.
To appease LinkedIn, Artisan removed all mentions of LinkedIn from its website. It used the name to compare some of its data features to those of LinkedIn. The CEO also took a crash course in vetting third-party vendors, ensuring his data partners were operating in accordance with LinkedIn’s policies.
Although Carmichael-Jack is happy to be back on the Microsoft-owned social network, he downplayed how damaging a reboot would have been, saying that very little of the data used by Artisan comes from the site. It is also preparing to release a new version of the agent, more autonomous and capable of using more channels to contact prospects.
“We can get around anything. We’ll launch dial-up as a channel in a few months – outgoing calls,” so if the LinkedIn ban couldn’t be overturned, “it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he said.
Interestingly, LinkedIn is not a direct competitor. He launched his first AI agent last year I called Hiring Assistantbut he focuses on recruiting. Still, the fact that LinkedIn has gone nuclear with Artisan could indicate that a sales agent could also one day be in the works. LinkedIn did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Regardless, the very public banning of Artisan can be seen as a warning to all agent actors looking for data sources: Big Tech is watching.
