Companies will hire more as a result of AI, says Upwork CEO

I’m going to kind of walk through it at this point. It’s it’s not just AI in terms of the types of jobs that your clients or customer base are moving into to help companies with. It’s also that Upwork is embarking on an AI journey of its own. I wonder if you might take us through what Upwork is doing with regard to this artificial intelligence craze that’s been happening and what exactly Upworks role is outside of placing jobs into AI. How is it using AI to transform itself into the next generation evolution of what Upwork can be? Yeah, this is a huge theme for us and we had a big release this week with a number of features coming to market. We launched UMA which is Upworks mindful AI and that is powering the intelligence behind a number of key features on our site such as our job post generator, our best match algorithm. But UMA is also the first step towards offering our customers an intelligent work companion that can do many more tasks for them as they’re going through their upward journey. And our vision here is really offering a solution that lets customers go from an idea to an outcome, from a dream to getting that delivered using artificial intelligence on Upwork. So the release that we had this week was really just the beginning of that journey and that bigger vision. I’ll also add that from our talent perspective, we already see that Upwork freelancers are using artificial intelligence tools at a tremendous rate. Internal surveys show that 54% of freelancers on our platform are using AI tools on a regular basis and that is massive compared to only 20% of freelancers on average in the broader economy and only 9% of internal corporate employees using these tools. So the town on our platform is already at the cutting edge of using these tools and technologies. And we ourselves are supercharging this by doing partnerships with all kinds of the most premier businesses that are offering these tools and putting those tools in the hands of talent so that they are the most productive, the most effective and the most skilled at using this because we’re building the destination for the most AI empowered talent in the world. So it sounds, Hayden, like you’re you’re allowing, you’re putting tools in place for potential freelance workers who would use your platform to better, more efficiently use it. What exactly does that mean? The executive assistant type or copilot, I don’t want to brand them, but you know a copilot type approach to this. What exactly can you get benefit wise from being a freelancer on up work? And then how, by extension, do companies who get placed with these workers get the benefit as well? Yeah, the benefit for talent is evident because when they get a preferential access to tools like for example our Upper Chat Pro, which has intelligence built in to help them complete jobs faster, to get assistance using their own data around the work that they’re doing every day on our platform, it lets them earn more money. It lets them save on the tools that they would have to buy in the free market at a more expensive rate. So it really helps them build their businesses more effectively for clients. You know, they’re looking for the best solution for talent that they need with the skills that are absolutely relevant in today’s economy. And they want to save money in terms of getting work done effectively. You know, they want to get productivity from their workers. And so Upwork is the destination where they can find those sought after skills and do so at a very effective rate because these workers are highly productive, much more productive than what they can find in other places. And it saves them from having to upskill and retool internal populations of employees that may not be learning as quickly or would be very expensive to retool themselves and Hayden.