aeqi vs Artisan

Nobody in the category markets harder than Artisan. The “Stop Hiring Humans” billboards drew over a billion impressions and a proper controversy — and underneath the provocation is a real product. “Hire Ava, the AI BDR that books meetings on autopilot”: she finds high-intent leads from a database of 250M+ verified B2B contacts, watches intent signals like funding rounds and leadership changes, runs personalized sequences across email, social, and phone, handles the replies, and books the meetings. Ava 2.0, rebuilt and launched in May 2026, made her self-serve from $250 a month — roughly a tenth of the old entry price — on about $36M in funding.

And unlike most of the “AI employee” wave, Ava genuinely executes — she doesn't suggest outreach, she sends it. The unit of the product is the seat: one role, filled deeply. Which is also the boundary. Ava works inside a sales motion that already exists — you bring the product, the pitch, the pipeline to feed her, and the team that takes the meetings she books.

One seat deep, or the whole floor

aeqi starts before the seat. Describe the business and a Company forms around it: agents staffed across the functions a business actually needs — building, marketing, sales, operations — with a ledger of work you can open and redirect, a live website, and a memory that belongs to the Company. The meetings still get booked; they land in the same ledger as the website updates and the follow-through, owned by roles with real permissions.

Where the results accrue

Both products execute rather than advise, which puts them on the same side of the category's most important line. The difference is where the learning goes. Ava optimizes within her seat — messaging variants, reply handling, send timing. aeqi's memory compounds across the whole business: what marketing learned changes what sales says, and the record of why is part of the product. A seat gets better at its job. A Company gets better at being a company.

What the price is a price of

As of July 2026: Ava self-serve from $250/month, with a reported $600/month annual-commitment plan above it. aeqi: flat plans at $49, $190, and $490 a month, each with a monthly credit capacity and a 3-day trial, no percentage of earnings. Artisan prices a specialized seat at well under a human BDR's cost — a fair trade for its buyer. aeqi prices the org around the seat.

Where Artisan is ahead today

As of July 2026: depth in the one thing it does — the contact database, intent signals, native dialer, deliverability plumbing, and A/B machinery that only come from years in a single lane — plus marquee customers, and marketing reach most startups can only envy. If your bottleneck is outbound volume inside a working sales org, Ava is built to remove exactly that.

The verdict

Choose Artisan to fill the BDR seat in a sales motion you already run — it is one of the deepest single-role agents there is. Choose aeqi when the floor around that seat is empty: when what you need is the business itself — a team across functions, a website, a ledger, and a memory — running under your direction. Artisan fills a seat. aeqi runs the floor.