Instant customer enrichment for the first fully autonomous AI BDR

Instant customer enrichment for the first fully autonomous AI BDR

Artisan is the AI sales platform behind Ava 2.0, the first AI BDR built to run end to end without a human in the loop. Ava sources leads, writes personalized outreach, handles replies, qualifies, objection-handles, and books meetings. She is already running outbound on behalf of thousands of AEs, AMs, and BDRs at SaaStr, CookUnity, SumUp, and others.

With Ava 2.0, Artisan launched the first AI BDR that customers can self-serve. Onboarding completes in under 10 minutes. The product replaces the patchwork of tools that outbound teams typically stack: ZoomInfo, Clay, Salesloft, Aircall, Common Room.

For self-serve to work at that speed, the moment of signup has to do the work that a sales rep used to do manually. That is where Linkup sits.

The friction

Before Ava can send a single email, she needs context: what the customer sells, who they sell to, how they position against competitors, what their ideal customer looks like. Historically, customers worked through this themselves at signup, which could take up to an hour of forms and copy-paste from their own site.

That setup time created friction at the most important moment of the customer journey:

• Customers who completed the setup carefully delayed their first campaign and lost the under-10-minute activation experience Ava 2.0 was built for
• Customers who moved through it quickly gave Ava lighter context, which made her first campaigns weaker than her steady-state output

For an autonomous-by-default product, the activation step needed to disappear. Self-serve onboarding only feels self-serve if it is invisible.

Why Artisan chose Linkup

Artisan needed an enrichment layer that could populate accurate company and ICP context in seconds, for every customer, with no human review. The team evaluated providers on four dimensions:

• Latency with depth options. Linkup offers both standard and deep search modes. The standard mode returns structured company context in under 10 seconds, fast enough to surface inside the activation flow. Deeper enrichment queries run in the background and populate progressively, so the customer sees value immediately and richer context fills in as it arrives. This split makes the experience feel instant without sacrificing depth.
• Output quality for LLM consumption. Ava is autonomous, so the context she receives directly determines the quality of every campaign she sends. Linkup returned the cleanest, most structured outputs among the providers tested, with the lowest hallucination rates on multi-entity company queries.
• Coverage across the long tail. Self-serve customers range from pre-seed startups with thin web footprints to mid-market businesses across every vertical. Linkup's coverage handled the long tail without falling back to generic context for smaller or newer companies, which was a failure mode on other APIs.
• Batch processing and rate limit flexibility. Artisan runs enrichment across thousands of customers and campaigns in parallel. Linkup's architecture scales horizontally for enterprise volumes, and the asynchronous tasks endpoint lets Artisan submit large batch jobs without managing rate limits manually. The flexibility to mix real-time queries with batch workloads on the same API was decisive.

How the integration works

Linkup is integrated across two layers of the Artisan platform.

• Self-serve onboarding. When a new customer creates an account, Artisan calls Linkup with the customer's domain. Linkup returns structured context on the company's business model, products, value proposition, market positioning, and ideal customer profile. That context is mapped directly into Ava's campaign configuration. ICP fields, messaging angles, competitor framing, and value proposition language are pre-populated. The customer reviews, adjusts if needed, and Ava starts running campaigns.

• Custom data point enrichment. Beyond onboarding, Linkup powers ongoing enrichment for email personalization and campaign building. Ava uses Linkup to pull live signals at the prospect and account level: news triggers, hiring activity from job posts, segmentation cues from website wording, product launches and official company publications, leadership changes, funding rounds. These signals feed directly into Ava's personalization layer, so each outbound message reflects what is happening at the target account right now.

Across both layers, standard mode handles low-latency calls inside live flows. The tasks endpoint handles batch enrichment for full campaign builds and account list refreshes.

Results

Since integrating Linkup, Artisan has seen the activation experience shift fundamentally:

• Enrichment step reduced from up to 10+ minutes to under 10 seconds. What used to be the longest part of signup is now the fastest.
• Self-serve activation completes in under 10 minutes. The launch promise of Ava 2.0 is enforceable at the funnel level, not just in marketing copy.
• First-campaign quality improved. Ava operates on accurate company and ICP context from the start, so her first messages perform closer to her steady-state output.
• Personalization signals at scale. Live news, hiring, and product data flow into every campaign through batch enrichment, lifting reply rates on outbound at volume.

"Linkup is what makes self-serve onboarding work at our speed. Customer enrichment used to be the longest step. Now it happens before the customer notices, and Ava is sending within minutes." — The Artisan Team

Conclusion

Ava 2.0's positioning rests on autonomy and activation speed. Both require accurate customer context the moment someone signs up, and ongoing signals at every stage of the campaign afterwards.

Linkup provides both: real-time enrichment in under 10 seconds for signup, and asynchronous batch enrichment for the live signals that power personalization across thousands of campaigns in parallel. Enrichment is no longer a setup step. It is part of how Ava works.

Ready to give your agents the context they need? Get started for free or talk to our team.