Our latest client success story shares how Ibotta, a cash-back rewards app, partnered with CloudFactory to improve accuracy and processing time on its important data-verification work. Retail consumers use Ibotta to submit photos of receipts for cash-back rewards from brands. With nearly 22 million downloads, it is one of the most frequently used shopping apps in the United States.

For all of AI’s promises, we still need people to do a lot of work behind the scenes to make it all possible. People collect, enrich, clean, and prepare data for AI systems to operate accurately and optimally. In fact, data scientists spend countless hours cleaning and combining datasets, a process commonly referred to as “data wrangling.”

Earlier this month, The Tech Tribune recognized CloudFactory as one of the 10 Best Tech Startups in Durham. The list of tech startups based in Durham, N.C., was the result of research on each company’s revenue potential, leadership team, brand and product traction, and competitive landscape.

We have a big mission at CloudFactory: to create meaningful work for people who don’t have access to economic opportunities. There are many other organizations that share our passion for assisting people with few resources, and some of them are right in the Durham, N.C. area. We wanted to give back to the community that is home to CloudFactory’s U.S. office, so we’ve partnered with a handful of these local organizations to lend a hand.

One of our clients said it best: “CloudFactory has people who care.” It’s true: our teams are known for high quality work, and they love the role they play in working with the world’s most innovative technology companies. Since 2008, we have helped hundreds of companies grow their businesses by providing a highly scalable, managed workforce to be an extension of their teams.

“[Video] data annotation is super labor-intensive. Each hour of data collected takes almost 800 human hours to annotate. How are you going to scale that?”

-Sameep Tandon, CEO of Drive.ai, an autonomous car startup in Silicon Valley and CloudFactory client

It’s their least favorite part of the job, yet it consumes most of their time. Data wrangling – or gathering and preparing dirty data so it can be used in critical business applications – is the biggest problem in data science today, according to a Kaggle survey. So how can you get clean, structured data you can trust?

So I might be CloudFactory’s biggest fan, aside from our Founder and CEO Mark Sears, of course. And I love my job as global talent acquisition manager because I get to talk to people every day about our mission and the interesting work we are doing for technology innovators.

For all of artificial intelligence’s promises, we still need humans in the loop to make it all possible. Humans collect, enrich, clean, and prepare data for AI systems to operate with optimal accuracy.

The world is producing data at exponential rates. By 2025, the global datasphere will include 10 times the amount of data generated last year alone, according to IDC’s Data Age 2025. All of this data generation compounds an already common problem: “dirty data.”