Much has been written about how AI is disrupting full-time white-collar jobs. But how is it affecting freelancers and the businesses that hire them? Dave Bottoms, vice president of product at global freelancing platform Upwork, discussed these issues and explained his company’s AI strategy with The AI Innovator.
The AI Innovator: Tell me about Upwork and its new AI product strategy, including Uma.
Dave Bottoms: Upwork’s mission is to create economic opportunities, so people have better lives. The product announcements bundled in our most recent Fall 2024 Upwork Updates are designed to advance this core mission in service of our customers – the small and large businesses and freelance talent connected via our marketplace. This collection of new product enhancements, features and partnerships make it easier for businesses and professionals to find and connect, hire, collaborate, and manage projects within our ecosystem.
Many of our innovations in AI involve the advancing capabilities of Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI. Uma powers our platform’s latest, most advanced AI-driven experiences and acts as an always-on companion, helping professionals achieve their business goals with confidence and ease. (For example, Uma can help freelancers create proposals and businesses compose job listings, among other content. It also provides enhanced matching of freelancing skills to company project requirements.)
Uma is powered by years of data from the Upwork platform —trillions of tokens comprising highly relevant interactions and moments across a range of work-specific engagements that we use to train our AI models to recommend solutions and advice to our customers that correlate with effective matching performance.
The recent AI updates are a part of Upwork’s broader vision of evolving from an on-demand hiring platform to a marketplace that delivers on-demand work outcomes, combining AI-driven tools, top talent, and enhanced services for better project delivery – reflecting our commitment to advancing both client and freelancer experiences with AI.
What are the top skills employers are hiring for today?
In 2024, emergent technologies like generative AI are having a major impact on the hiring landscape. Specifically, according to Upwork’s Most In-Demand Work Skills in 2024 list, skills like data science and analytics are some of the most in-demand work skills, while generative AI modeling and machine learning are two of the fastest-growing skills in that category.
With that, there is significant opportunity for professionals to upskill and accelerate their careers into better-paying project-based work to meet this surge in demand. Whether you’re just starting on Upwork or looking to grow your business, we offer expert-led mini-courses, and extensive content from our partners. These programs enable freelancers to boost their profiles with certifications and attract more clients through Upwork’s marketplace.
What are your views on AI development and hiring? Do you think people can still be competitive against AI? Why or why not?
AI development has certainly shifted the landscape of hiring and workforce competitiveness. While some businesses may attempt to completely replace certain roles or skills with generative AI, they’re going to see a variability in terms of the quality of output. They will likely realize that the way to truly get ahead is by using AI in conjunction with – not in place of – skilled people doing strategic work. While AI can automate and streamline repetitive processes, human adaptability, creativity and critical thinking, coupled with the ability to build and sustain relationships, will continue to be invaluable.
When it comes to organizations that want to quickly adopt AI and stay at pace with innovation, Upwork research identified a significant gap that exists between AI adoption and workforce readiness, with many employees lacking proficiency in AI-based solutions. Forward-thinking companies are bridging this gap by focusing on workforce training and upskilling, ensuring their employees are equipped to work with these new AI tools, and can adapt to more flexible workforce models by hiring freelance workers with AI skills to fill critical gaps.
Why are the best AI products the ones that tap into human creativity, empathy, and contextual understanding?
AI products that are built with contextual understanding are powerful because they can provide more personal and nuanced results. Having a deeper understanding of interpreting information allows AI to problem-solve creatively by connecting dots from disparate sources of information. Part of the magic of Upwork is our data and insights from a full range of hiring and work behaviors on our platform. We draw from millions of data points from our marketplace that help our machine learning models powering Uma make real-time connections between what is happening across the Upwork marketplace. In this way, our AI-powered solutions are supercharged by years of expertise, so that companies and freelancers alike are able to hire, get started and complete more high-quality work.
What does the 67% year-over-year increase in AI-related work seen by Upwork say about the broader labor market?
There’s no denying that AI is impacting almost every industry and the way we work today and will work tomorrow. Companies are racing to adopt AI solutions and hire AI talent. On the flip side, professionals are upskilling in AI to stay competitive.
Upwork isn’t a stranger to massive tech transformations, the company has been fueled by cutting-edge technologies since we started more than 20 years ago. We were founded on the idea that technology could break down barriers and borders and bring people together to unleash their uniquely human potential to work together in ways made possible by technological advances of the last few decades.
Fast-forward to today, AI is a game-changer for work and we are fully embracing this moment. We see significant opportunity in AI as a force-multiplier for our platform and for the talented professionals on it to not only augment their work for clients – whether that’s coding, marketing, research or design – but also in getting started on that work faster by being really crisp about the jobs and skills being sought and the business outcome that is desired by clients of all sizes.
It’s also a force-multiplier for businesses, as long as they’re open to new ways of working. Work that takes days today will soon just take minutes. Time and resources previously spent on tedious, repetitive work can be replaced by what humans do best: strategizing, exercising judgment and creative thinking. AI is a tremendous and powerful augmentation tool.
What’s next for Upwork?
Uma is the first step toward realizing Upwork’s vision for how to serve customer needs using AI. In the year ahead, we’ll build on our recent product updates and continue to unleash the power of Uma across new surfaces, workflows and use cases, as well as continuing to innovate and optimize other dimensions of the world’s work marketplace on behalf of our customers. Our goal is to make Upwork the premier destination for on-demand work outcomes. The future of work is now, and there’s a smarter way to work, combining high-quality talent, best-in-class tools and cutting-edge AI.
We’ll continue to stay true to our core mission, of providing businesses access to the world’s best expert talent, but with Uma and the products announced in our recent Upwork Updates we are accelerating delivery of better work outcomes for a wide range of customer needs.
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