Naoma vs Artisan: Ava Fills Your Funnel, Naoma Converts It

Quick Takeaways

• Artisan's Ava is an autonomous AI BDR that fills the top of the funnel — prospect research, personalized email and LinkedIn outreach, meeting booking — while Naoma is a full-cycle AI account executive that converts the inbound end: a live demo of your real product, qualification, and booking the moment a buyer arrives.
• The "Stop Hiring Humans" billboards made Ava the most recognizable AI sales employee anywhere; fame aside, Artisan does not demo software, so the two products buy different outcomes.
• Artisan meters credits per action — the one widely corroborated list figure is Employee at $600/mo billed annually; Naoma bills per engaged demo from a published $299/mo, chargeable only after 3 minutes.
• Artisan raised a $25M Series A in April 2025 (roughly $46–48M total, reported) yet shows a G2 seller aggregate of 4.0 across 26 reviews; Naoma holds a 4.9 on G2 and a 5.0 on Product Hunt.
• The jobs chain naturally — outreach wins the visit, the demo wins the deal: in the AiSDR deployment, 53% of Naoma demos ran 3+ minutes and 21% produced a qualified lead.

You have seen the billboards. "Stop Hiring Humans" went from a provocative 2024 slogan to Times Square and, by May 2026, aerial banners over San Francisco — making Ava the best-known AI sales employee anywhere and, by Artisan's own figures, driving about $5M in revenue while lifting San Francisco brand recognition from 5% to 70%. It also drew a rebuke from Bernie Sanders. It worked commercially and cost goodwill; both are true.

Behind the campaign is an outbound AI BDR, and "outbound" is the entire comparison. Ava earns attention in cold inboxes; Naoma converts attention on your website — when the buyer finally wants to see the product, the agent shows it live, qualifies, and books. Everything below is stated as of August 2026, with published and reported figures labeled.

Quick comparison

What Artisan does

Artisan — a San Francisco Y Combinator alum founded by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack — sells Ava, "the autonomous AI BDR." She works outbound end to end: research and enrichment against a 300M+ contact database, personalized email and LinkedIn sequences, deliverability management, reply handling, and meeting booking, with configurable human approval gates. Ava 2.0 shipped on 26 May 2026 and made the product self-serve; third-party writeups report a free tier of roughly 300 credits a month. The security page lists SOC 2 Type II (report under NDA), ISO 27001, and PCI DSS.

Artisan raised a $25M Series A in April 2025 led by Glade Brook Capital (roughly $46–48M total, reported); reported scale: >$6M ARR and ~250 customers. Its best evidence is the SumUp case study — 400K+ personalized emails, 8–15 positive responses a week, $52 per lead (vendor figures) — alongside named customers Quora and Informa.

What Naoma does

Naoma is a full-cycle AI account executive for inbound. The agent greets a visitor, runs discovery, then delivers a demo shaped to that buyer's needs, industry, and role — slides, the real product driven live in a browser session, branching journeys on higher tiers — handles objections, qualifies, and completes the play: a meeting booked, or the buyer routed straight to signup and checkout, with everything written back to the CRM. It speaks 33 languages, auto-detected and switchable mid-demo; Naoma builds the demo for you (Scale adds a dedicated demo engineer); and every plan ships the high-converting website widget with built-in chat bot.

Ava's story is told in a video above. Naoma would rather be interviewed than introduced — the embed below is the live agent, the actual product:

After the reply, the buyer says "show me"

Ava's win condition is interest: a positive reply, a meeting on a rep's calendar. Every interested buyer's next sentence is some version of "show me the product" — and at that exact point Artisan's automation ends: your humans schedule and deliver the demo by hand. We priced that relay in AI demo agent vs hiring another SDR.

Naoma is built for that moment instead. The demo starts when intent peaks, not days later: real software driven live, branching with the buyer's answers, objections handled mid-flow, qualification done inside the conversation, and the close routed to a calendar or straight to checkout. Prospect memory plus account enrichment means the agent recognizes a returning buyer and resumes the thread.

There is also what "an AI employee" physically is. Ava is a character — an illustrated persona on billboards and in inboxes, with email and LinkedIn as her channels and no verified voice product. Naoma's agent has an actual face and voice on a live call: best-in-class realistic avatars, branded mascots, and animated avatars — the signature agent among them, or a custom avatar Naoma builds for you — with conversational reaction roughly 20% faster than an ElevenLabs stack. One is a brand; the other sits in meetings.

Two meters: credits burned vs demos engaged

Artisan prices in credits ("credit-based pricing, plan tiers for startups through enterprise," per its pricing page). Campaigns consume roughly 20–25 credits per prospect, and mailboxes bill separately (both reported). The one widely corroborated list figure — per two independent May 2026 writeups — is Employee at $600/mo billed annually with 30K monthly credits; a free tier and a ~$250/mo Intern tier are reported since Ava 2.0, and enterprise tiers are quote-only (third-party estimates conflict).

Naoma's whole ladder is published on the pricing page: Starter $299/mo — 50 engaged demos, demos built from your slides and screenshots, lead capture, CRM export; Growth $900/mo — 100 engaged demos, live product walkthrough, meeting booking; Scale $2,500/mo — 300 engaged demos, two agents, branching and deep personalization, a dedicated demo engineer; Enterprise custom with SSO and SLA. Annual billing: $249, $750, $2,083.

The root difference is what triggers a charge. A credit burns when Ava acts, whether or not anyone answers; a Naoma demo bills only after a prospect stays engaged for 3 minutes, and bounces cost nothing. One meter counts effort, the other attention — the ROI calculator shows what your traffic is worth under the second.

What a buyer can verify: fame is not proof

For a brand this famous, Artisan's public review base is modest: a G2 seller aggregate of 4.0 across 26 reviews, with 2026 roundups citing 3.7–4.3 across its listings and a Trustpilot near 4.0. Reviewers praise the clean onboarding and setup speed; complaints cluster on messaging that reads "obviously AI," low reply rates in narrow ICPs, and lead-data gaps. Not damning for a young product — the billboards are simply ahead of the receipts.

Naoma's receipts are the point. Start with volume — Naoma has conducted more than 50,000 AI demos. Add a 4.9 on G2, a 5.0 on Product Hunt with #1 Product of the Day and #1 Product of the Month in Marketing — and rates from a named deployment: AiSDR, an outbound AI SDR vendor in Artisan's own market, chose Naoma as its inbound demo layer. In the AiSDR case study, 53% of demos ran 3+ minutes, the average conversation lasted 7 minutes 50 seconds, 21% produced a qualified lead, and 6% ended with a booked meeting.

Where Ava fits, and where Naoma wins

Hire Ava when the gap is outbound muscle: no list, no sequences, no deliverability infrastructure, and a preference for a self-serve start — the free tier makes trying it cheap, and SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are already in place. Budget honestly for credits, mailbox costs, and the tuning good reply rates require.

Hire Naoma when demand already reaches your site and leaks out through a "book a demo" form. One agent gives every visitor a live demo in their language, qualifies mid-conversation, and books or routes to checkout — billed only on engaged demos. The honest gaps: Naoma is GDPR compliant with SOC 2 still in progress, and self-serve purchase with a free trial arrives September 2026 — until then, every plan starts with a booked walkthrough.

Plenty of teams will run both, because the jobs chain: Ava lands the visit, Naoma converts it. For adjacent matchups, read Naoma vs 11x and AI SDR vs human SDR, or scan every comparison we publish.

FAQ

Is Artisan's Ava an AI demo agent? No — Ava is an autonomous AI BDR that researches prospects and runs email and LinkedIn outreach to book meetings; she does not present product demos, while Naoma's agent demos your real software live.

What does Artisan actually cost? Pricing is credit-based; the one widely corroborated list figure as of August 2026 is Employee at $600/mo billed annually with 30K credits; enterprise tiers are quote-only, while Naoma publishes every tier from $299/mo on its pricing page.

Can Artisan and Naoma run in the same stack? Yes — Ava fills the funnel with interested buyers; Naoma converts those visitors with a live demo, qualification, and booking at the moment of intent.

Did the Stop Hiring Humans campaign actually work? By Artisan's own figures, yes commercially — about $5M in attributed revenue and San Francisco brand recognition up from 5% to 70% — while also drawing public backlash, including a rebuke from Bernie Sanders.

The billboard gets the buyer to your door; someone still has to give the demo. Get an AI demo now →