AI’s New Workforce: The Data-Labelling Industry Spreads Globally
Hundreds of thousands employed in lower-income countries such as India and Philippines
By Madhumita Murgia
On the fringes of the Indian city of Kolkata, in the dusty, crowded neighbourhood of Metiabruz, 460 young women are working at the vanguard of artificial intelligence.
The women, mostly from the local Muslim community, are helping to train computer vision algorithms used in autonomous vehicles and augmented reality systems, for the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, eBay and TripAdvisor.
The all-female centre is one of eight Indian offices operated by iMerit, an India- and US-based data annotation company, whose 2,200 local employees label the oceans of data generated by industries as diverse as manufacturing, medical imaging, autonomous driving, retail, insurance and agriculture.
The operation is part of a growing data-labelling industry that employs hundreds of thousands of workers in lower-income countries including Kenya, India and the Philippines.
Companies such as Figure Eight and Mighty AI, and more traditional IT companies such as Accenture and Wipro, are forming part of a so-called “AI supply chain” that creates algorithms able to interpret…
