As AI becomes more powerful, the worst fears have finally come true.

A San Francisco tech company has started blatantly announcing "Stop hiring humans"!

Just down Mississippi Street in San Francisco, some hoteliers have been on strike for months, demanding better pay and more jobs.

On the other side, Artisan's eye-catching billboard reads "Stop hiring humans!"

Stop hiring humans. Agents are your best employees

Artisan has just 30 employees and is less than two years old; Its only existing product isa "sales agent" called Artisan, designed to automate the job of finding and contacting potential customers.

At the same time, the startup is promoting itself with a variety of provocative ads.

Most of the ads it runs are easy to understand, such as "Artisan doesn't complain about life/work imbalance" and "Hire Artisan, not humans," some of which include the phrase "The age of AI employees has arrived."

In a video AD for the "selling agent" tool, Artisan says it requires no manual instruction input and costs 96 percent less than hiring a human to do the job.

Companies have already begun to lay off workers, and this kind of advertising has triggered a strong reaction and resistance.

"Let's have an AI child, not a real one, after all they are much cheaper," people commented, while some suggested burning the billboard. One person simply wrote: "San Francisco is going to be a place that hates people."

Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack later responded to the billboard criticism. He acknowledged the AD's "dystopian" tone, but continued to support the campaign.

"While these billboards are dystopian, so is AI," says the young CEO. "The way the world works is already changing."

Carmichael Jack said his startup benefited from the month-long billboard campaign, which saw a "crazy increase" in brand awareness, along with a significant increase in product sales.

Artisan doesn't actually have a lot of billboards, he added, but they're "very impactful." In other words, the inflammatory advertisements undoubtedly served their purpose.

These billboards show how startups stand out from tech giants who are more inclined to protect corporate reputations.

Carmichael-Jack also responded to questions about giving human names and faces to its AI products. Because the provocative text was on top of an image of a woman.

Despite its purple eyes, matte skin and overly symmetrical face, it could easily be mistaken for a real person.

"It's not uncommon, think Siri, think Alexa," he said, "people still want to work with humans, and working with our Artisan feels more like working with humans than with a product, so it makes sense for us to humanize her."

This need to work more with humans is where the dilemma lies for executives who might consider replacing sales reps with agents. So what do companies that decide to stop hiring human workers do? Based on the growing market trend for tools like Artisan, we may not have to wait long to find out.

Artisan also hung a defiant banner at its booth at TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup conference in San Francisco in October, with the classic slogan "Stop hiring humans" written in very large letters.

Salesforce continuously promoted its similar agent product at its big Dreamforce conference in September, but usually included a phrase about AI agents that work alongside humans.

But Artisan has no such constraints, and its ambitions are growing. It even boldly claims that "Artisan marks the beginning of the next industrial revolution".

OpenAI CFO: Professional business services, thousands of dollars per month

Not only that, but a recent statement by OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar shocked many people

For $2,000 a month, AI can make humans obsolete?

Currently, OpenAI offers consumers a $20 per month subscription service, as well as a newly launched $200 per month option to support access to the o1 model. For businesses, these services charge a flat fee per person.

Even OpenAI is already considering charging a $2,000 monthly subscription fee for some AI products.

Isn't that too expensive?

In response, Friar said, "If it can be used as a PhD-level assistant to help me with anything, anywhere in the world, then the price is reasonable."

She reminds business owners to also consider: in this case, "do you need to go out and hire more humans?"

In conclusion, Friar said that in the future OpenAI may be able to charge customers based on the value they get from using its products, especially in enterprises.

For example, for lawyers who rely on AI for "ready-to-use paralegal" or academics who rely on it for research breakthroughs, because it helps offset the huge costs of developing AI systems.

Friar noted that OpenAI is about to launch AI agents that can perform complex tasks, and that such tools could be valuable by automating some jobs.

If these artificial intelligence products that can replace manpower and bring economic benefits are not used, enterprises have to employ more employees and other traditional ways to complete the corresponding work, which involves capital investment such as human costs, as well as the cost of personnel replacement.

So the question has yet to be answered: if companies no longer need to hire so many people, what will happen to the extra people?