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The “Don’t hire humans” people are hiring a human BDR.
Why?
They said it best: “The phone is for humans.”
In case you missed it, Artisan got a bit famous a couple years back with a viral billboard campaign. Few B2B SaaS campaigns have pissed off more people than Artisan’s infamous signage:
In May, they retracted the position, with a lengthy article articulating “a more careful argument about AI, work, and what humans should actually be doing.”
And launched…
…a dialer…
…for humans…
Fast forward a couple months and here they are hiring a human BDR.
A few questions that naturally arise when such a pivot takes place after such a big bet ($2M billboard campaign, apparently).
Were they wrong to say “stop hiring humans”?
They answered this one themselves.
Yes: if you say “stop hiring humans” then hire a human for the very thing your overly-anthropomorphized purple-eye-color virtual-bots were supposed to replace, you have falsified your statement.
Should you trust hot-VC-backed-tech-startups that plaster themselves over the world and over your linkedin feed with your sales tech?
It helps to check founder backgrounds.
In this case, serial founder. No sales XP.
I think it’s fair to say the social experiment Artisan bet on failed hard. “They were too early” is a frequent defense, and that may be right, as far as email outbound is concerned.
But they were dead wrong about the phone.
Keep doing what you do: pick up the phone, put in the reps, dispositioning calls, researching orgs and contacts, having conversations.
You’ll be ok.
Should you buy the new dialer they just launched?
Again, it helps to check founder backgrounds.
If you buy the “slapped together in a few months” dialer from a Y Combinator backed company, you’ll find…
Number reputation is a second class citizen, but a first class problem
Parallel dialer functionality, cuz “why not?” (we know why not - connect rates decay in direct relationship to the increase in the number of parallel lines)
Interestingly, Artisan is poking at the “heavy parallel dialers” that allow up to 10 lines at once, while only allowing 3 parallel lines at once on their dialer.
That’s still 2 too many.
According to Artisan, they’re launching a dialer because legally their AI SDRs can’t cold call. But there are reasons hidden between the lines as well:
There are massive headwinds to automated email outbound. It takes a human to manage the infrastructure at scale. All they did was package that up as a retainer-based service, called it a SaaS, and gave you an interface in between.
Their clients, I guarantee it, are asking for cold calling resources. And there is a shortage of great callers. But it’s easier to vibe code a dialer (in theory) than it is to train reps to succeed on the phone.
There is no shortage of dialers on the market, interestingly. We’re tracking 61.
14 were launched in 2020 or later.
All but one are parallel dialers.
93% of dialers launched in 2020 or later are parallel dialers. 13 of 14.
Can’t make this up.
(I actually helped build the one at ServiceBell > rebranded to Rep.ai > now defunct; consider me a recovering parallelist).
Why is every sales tech founder swallowing the parallel dialer drug?
It’s an appealing concept: call more humans. Faster. Uses an AI algorithm to decipher if a human answers. Has “cool” written all over it.
But ultimately, it is the snake that eats itself.
It reminds me of San Francisco’s somewhat successful waste recycling program: they take landfill-bound trash, and recover recyclable plastics from it. Genius.
In a system where downstream quality (what’s recycled vs what’s discarded as trash) relies on human review (you, tossing stuff into your garbage, are not great at it at scale), this makes sense.
But who’s checking your phone numbers?
You’re shoveling mostly-wrong, mostly-inaccurate garbage through a system that is not designed to clean it. It’s just designed to treat it all the same.
Parallel dialing is nowhere near the same as Phone Intent / number verification.
The opportunity cost is massive with parallel dialing: those you don’t connect, give you no feedback.
Worse: Parallel dialing isn't a lever. It's a loan against your own connect rate due to the decay, and the bill comes back as spam flags on numbers that have no business dialing at that velocity.
The problem isn't that parallel dialing “doesn’t work” - it does what it says it will do: calls lots of numbers. But it stops working because it worked. It’ll call a bunch of numbers, sure.
Then it’ll burn the numbers you’re using faster than they can be remediated or replenished.
Every parallel dial that doesn't connect teaches you nothing and costs you something. That's the worst trade in outbound.
Anyway, don’t trust AI hype. Don’t trust parallel dialers.
And for one final dose of AIrony:
Artisan’s billboards are still up…
This one’s from 10th and somewhere in the 50s in Manhattan. That whole apology post was a sham.
Yep. Still reppin’ robots.
Thanks for reading,
Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)
P.S. How’d you feel about Artisan’s billboards? C’mon be honest.