AI Creates New Jobs and Titles for Workers

If NASA’s recruitment for a planetary protection officer teaches us anything, it’s that interesting job titles are a sign of the times. We are just beginning to feel the impact of automation and artificial intelligence in the workplace, and we can expect that impact to grow as AI matures. Instead of being a job taker as many suspected, it’s shaping up to be a job creator.

Everyday wild tales are told about the implications of AI. It seems everyone has an opinion, and more questions are raised than answered. Will we be forced, one day, to swear fealty to our robot overlords? Is the hype completely overblown? Or, is the truth somewhere in the middle? Probably. After all, equivocation is the safest space for amateur prognosticators, knowing full well it provides nothing in the way of clarity.

Today there are AI-powered apps that can tell you the breed of your dog or the species of a plant in seconds simply by taking a photo. When you upload an image to Facebook, your friends are identified immediately based on facial recognition technology. The ability for machines to do this specific type of analysis has, in some cases, surpassed humans, and the lifeblood of these advanced AI technologies is visual data.

We’re incredibly excited to announce a $7.3 million Series B round from prominent impact investors including Dolma Impact Fund and The Social Entrepreneurs' Fund. The investment comes after the successful launch of WorkStreams™, which provide fast-growing companies an alternative to the stagnant outsourcing and dubious crowdsourcing options currently available.

Today, there is a lot more to running a political campaign than shaking hands and kissing babies. In the past decade, big data has played a huge role in political races. In both U.S. presidential campaigns, Barack Obama famously leveraged data and analytics to learn more about and attract individual voters.

It’s clear that automation has come a long way. Self-driving cars are now being tested on public roads, many routine business process have been automated, and the manufacturing industry relies on robots – and it’s not slowing down. By 2018, it’s estimated that 1.3 million industrial robots working in factories around the globe. The simple fact is that automation is disrupting every industry, from healthcare to marketing, and it is changing how we interact and get work done.

One of the coolest things for everyone working at CloudFactory is the amazing technology our customers are creating. Their spirit of innovation inspires each of us to push our own boundaries and solve new problems by thinking differently. We get to support our customers as they quite literally create the future, and that is a novelty that never wears off.

One area we’re particularly excited about is the development of AI for autonomous driving vehicles. Whether it’s working with a customer like Embark, who is creating the first ever autonomous driving trucks, or drive.ai, who is using deep learning to “build the brain of self-driving vehicles”. These are ambitious efforts that could lead to a safer, cleaner, and more productive future.

When most people think about artificial intelligence (AI), they envision high-tech robots and automated processes, or, in a more romantic sense, the promise of technology finally being realized. Hardly anyone thinks about the actual people behind the technology. However, for every game-changing technology and innovative product, there is a team of humans conceiving new ideas, powering them from behind the scenes, and collaborating alongside it.

We often get asked how CloudFactory is different from crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). Simply put, while CloudFactory provides access to a talented workforce, we’re not a pure crowdsourcing model, we provide an enterprise alternative to crowdsourcing that is built to handle critical business processes that need to be done right.