
Upwork has extended the artificial intelligence capabilities it makes available across its platform to both make it simpler for freelancers to craft proposals and easier for employers to identify candidates that have the best skills and experience based on past performance.
Initially rolled out earlier this year, the additions to the Upwork Mindful AI (UMA) portfolio are the latest in what is a strategic effort to compress the amount of time required to find and hire the best freelance talent available, says Dave Bottoms, general manager and vice president of product for the Upwork Marketplace.
There may even come a day soon when an organization might consist of only one person that is orchestrating the delivery of a service enabled by contractors that have all been augmented in one way or another by AI technologies, he adds.
Upwork already provides organizations with access to an online community of contractors that have expertise across more than 10,000 skills, including website and application development, data science and analytics, customer support, finance and operations. It’s not clear to what degree an organization can entirely rely on contractors, but in the age of AI it’s clear those contractors will become increasingly more efficient. In fact, many of the mundane tasks that take time away from actually completing a project, such as billing clients, will become more automated.
Ultimately, each of those contractors should, as a result, be able to simultaneously manage many more projects, says Bottom. “Time has always been the great constraint,” he notes.
Less clear is to what degree those contractors might be able to command a premium fee as it becomes simpler to perform many tasks with the help of AI and the barrier for entry into many fields will decline. As the supply of contractors increases in any given field, pricing pressure on contractors will inevitably increase.
However, demand for expertise might also rise as organizations rely less on full-time employees to manage tasks when there is a global base of talent readily accessible.
The implications of that shift for the global economy are, of course, profound but there is no putting the AI genie back in the bottle. It may be a while before AI agents, for example, are able to complete an end-to-end task on their own, but as AI advances continue to be made, the reasoning capabilities embedded into AI models will become more robust.
In the meantime, independent contractors will need to adapt. AI is not going to eliminate jobs so much as it does enable individuals that have mastered to supplant those who have not. Competition among independent providers of services that, in many cases is already fierce, is only going to intensify. Each provider of a service, like it or not, will need to come to terms with an overall faster pace of doing business as their customer expectations evolve in the AI era.
There will, naturally, be plenty of contractors that may decide they simply might rather retire or simply find another field altogether, but for everyone that decides to exit there may be two or more willing to step in.