#Behavioral Data

[digitaltechsolutions]

Understanding the Internet of Behavior: Transforming Technology Through Personalization

We are no longer living in a ‘hyper-connected world’ where the technology has graduated from just connecting devices to understand and anticipate our needs, desires, and even our behavior. This is called the Internet of Behavior, an emerging concept building on top of IoT but adding a powerful layer of behavioral insights. IoB seeks to interpret data about human actions and patterns to offer tailored experiences, improve business outcomes, and even enhance public welfare. But it comes with ethical issues regarding its use on questions of privacy and proper applications for personal data.

What is the Internet of Behaviour (IoB)?

Internet of Behaviour is essentially the collection of user data that can be obtained from multiple sources including connected devices, social media, purchasing patterns, as well as location tracking for the understanding and predictability of human behavior. This includes taking a step further to analyze the data and hence creating actionable insights about the people using those devices when making the focus on gathering data from multiple devices in IoT.

This enables the IoB to analyze the “what” and “why” within the actions of users, thereby helping organizations provide more personalized services or tailor their offerings to accommodate particular needs, thereby influencing future user behavior in a directed manner.

How Does IoB Work?

IoB leverages a mix of technologies, including AI, machine learning, and big data analytics, to process and interpret data collected from various sources:

1. Data Collection: It collects data from different sources, including IoT devices, social media activity, browsing history, purchase history, wearable health devices, and mobile applications. Each of them provides evidence to a person’s behaviors, preferences, and motivations in more concrete manners.

2. Data Analysis: AI algorithms analyze such data to find patterns and correlations, which may signify particular behaviors. For example, analyzing what one browses and purchases might show purchase motivations, preferred brands, and needs.

3. Behavioral Insights and Actions: Now that the data is processed, it provides companies and organizations with the ability to decide upon how they engage the individuals. Such insights can be used in tailoring product recommendations, delivering targeted advertising, or even adjusting service delivery according to what resonates best with certain segments.

4. Feedback Loops: The other essential aspect of IoB is that it provides a real-time feedback loop. And while users respond to the customized services, IoB aggregates more data about the interactions that have been made, thus refining the accuracy of future predictions and allowing the systems to “learn” the user’s preferences in a deeper pattern over time.

Real-World Applications of IoB

IoB is already transforming various sectors, bringing personalized, data-driven experiences to users. Here’s how it’s being applied in some critical areas:

1. Healthcare and Wellness IoB allows medical professionals to create highly personalized treatment plans. Wearables, like fitness monitors and smartwatches, can track activity levels, heartbeat, and even sleep patterns. They can, based on this data, provide healthcare professionals with recommendations for lifestyle adjustments, remote monitoring of health, or even the prediction of possible medical problems before they worsen.

2. Retail and E-commerce Online vendors use the Internet of Behavior to learn users’ shopping behavior and styles for a more personalized recommendation, for which, with the information of how and what users prefer or spend on with their interest in products, can effectively be used by e-commerce sites to make recommendations most aligned with the tastes of the buyer, thus increasing conversion rates and loyalty.

3. Public Safety IoB data can be employed to facilitate city authorities to increase public safety through foot traffic patterns, climatic conditions, and previous incidents for the identification of high-risk areas and times. Resource allocation and proactive safety measures through predictive ability

4. Marketing and Advertising IoB greatly benefits the marketing industry. Considering that the behavior of online subjects is now analyzed, IoB can assist marketers in recognizing what message or offer works best for which particular audience segment. Even personalized ads, email campaigns, and dynamic web content are more accurate and attractive with the insight rendered by IoB.

5. Workplace Productivity Companies have just begun to apply IoB tools to understand patterns of employee workflows, communication habits, and other performance metrics. Companies can create a more effective workplace, improve the well-being of employees, and reduce burnout by making suggestions for breaks or changes in routines based on how people work best.

Benefits of IoB

Enhanced Personalization: Hyper-personalized services and products in IoB lead to increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Improves decision-making: Companies can even make more informed decisions based on their products, services, and marketing strategies to appeal directly to their users.

Predictive Capabilities: The IoB allows companies to anticipate or know the need or behavior of a customer, thus solving problems even before they develop, or it provides pro-active support to a customer.

Ethical and Privacy Challenges

While IoB offers numerous benefits, it also raises significant ethical and privacy concerns. Here are some of the main challenges associated with the Internet of Behaviour:

1. Privacy Risks IoB necessitates collecting elaborate data that is associated with privacy risks, as the study of users’ personal and sometime sensitive information is being monitored. Organizations need to be able to ensure that organizations can comply with data protection regulations like GDPR to guarantee the right protection of user privacy.

2. Data Security IoB relies heavily on data sources that could be termed easy preys for cyberattacks. Thus, data security and therefore tightening cybersecurity measures to protect associated sensitive information at large is important.

3. Ethical Use of Data IoB has influence as well as manipulation power over behavior; therefore, companies should ensure that data collected from IoB must be used responsibly without exploiting or manipulating the consumer. Transparency is also essential about data usage, and consent must be obtained.

4. Bias in Algorithms Since IoB relies heavily on AI and machine learning, biases in the algorithms can skew results at best and may influence decisions about people. Algorithmic fairness has to be considered because IoB cannot unfairly target or exclude certain groups of users.

The Future of IoB: What Lies Ahead?

Further evolution of IoB will spread its impact towards business and society as a whole. Future developments of IoB include more regulations concerning the usage of data, better technologies for transparency and security. Added with IoB could be Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) to create some immersive, behavior-responsive experience in gaming, education, and retail.

Responsible IoB will attract enormous attention because companies balance personalized services with respect to user privacy and ethical considerations. Inasmuch as responsible data is accorded, IoB will revolutionize the way we interface with technology and the world.

Final Thoughts

Internet of Behaviour leaps forward in data-driven insight, thus meaning organizations can serve people more customised and user-centric. But with all new opportunities comes a sense of responsibility by which business will need to ensure good deal of data management through ethical and secure means. Once matured, IoB would need transparency, trust and responsible data practices to make its maximum potential fruitful for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and society as a whole.

This balance of innovation and ethical responsibility makes IoB the key player toward a digital future transforming the ways in which we interact and expect from technology.

[jcmarchi]

Assaf Baciu, Co-Founder & President of Persado – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/assaf-baciu-co-founder-president-of-persado-interview-series/

Assaf Baciu, Co-Founder & President of Persado – Interview Series

Assaf Baciu has nearly two decades of experience shaping enterprise strategy and product direction for market-leading SaaS organizations. As co-founder and President of Persado, he drives the progression and advancements of Persado’s growing product portfolio and oversees the company’s customer onboarding, campaign delivery management, Center of Enablement programs, and technical services.

Persado offers a Motivation AI platform designed to enable personalized communications at scale, encouraging individuals to engage and take action. Several of the world’s largest brands, such as Ally Bank, Dropbox, JPMorgan Chase, Marks & Spencer, and Verizon, use Persado’s platform to create highly personalized communications. According to the company, the top 30 Persado customers have collectively generated over $4.25 billion in additional revenue through the use of the platform.

Can you share the story behind the founding of Persado and how your previous experiences influenced its creation?

My co-founder, Alex Vratskides, and I founded Persado 12 years ago. We were at Upstream, and became fascinated with how text message response rates changed with even minor tweaks in the language. Given that the number of characters is limited for SMS, we started thinking about text messages as a mathematical problem that has some finite number of alternative messages, and with the right algorithm we could find the optimal ones. We evaluated some approaches and saw that there is a way…and the rest is history.

Persado’s Motivation AI Platform is highlighted for its ability to personalize marketing content. Can you explain how the platform uses generative AI to understand and leverage customer motivation?

GenAI, on its own, via a foundation model, cannot motivate systematically. It’s a component with a stack of data, machine learning, and a response feedback loop.

Persado has been generating and optimizing language using various approaches for over 10 years. We’ve accumulated a unique dataset from one million A/B tests from messages, across industries, designed to connect with consumers and motivate action at any stage. We leverage this data to finetune a foundation model with Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We’ve also adapted a second transformer model to be able to predict message performance based on language parameters. On top of that, our machine learning (ML) algorithms understand—in real time—which language elements resonate with a given individual, then adjust the copy within the communication to that person or segment.

By continuously learning the most effective combination of message elements for each consumer, and dynamically creating the most engaging content, Persado-generated content is able to outperform human and other AI-generated copy 96% of the time.

How does Persado’s Motivation AI Platform differentiate itself from other generative AI tools in terms of driving business results?

Persado is unique on many fronts.

Purpose-Built – Persado has the only models specifically trained and curated with 10 billion tokens of marketing enterprise communication, coupled with behavioral data.

Emotionally Intelligent – Our AI is designed to understand and generate language that elicits specific emotional responses from target audiences. This capability is grounded in advanced ML models trained on extensive linguistic and psychological data.

Precision – Our platform leverages the most powerful model architectures and is trained with statistically valid customer behavior data. We have executed the equivalent of more than 1M A/B tests, which enables us to generate the specific words, phrases, emotions, and stories that drive incremental impact 96% of time.

Knowledge Graph – Persado developed a representation of key concepts expressed via language and their relationship with the market vertical, type of communications, customer lifecycle journey, and channels. We use advanced NLP techniques to classify, identify, and make use of these concepts (emotions, narratives, structure of message, voice, and more) to generate and personalize better performing messages.

Predictive – We use predictive analytics to forecast the performance of different messages, empowering marketers to create content with a high probability of success. This predictive power is unique and offers customers a great competitive edge.

What are some of the key capabilities that Persado’s AI platform offers to ensure a seamless integration with existing marketing technologies?

Our platform securely integrates with a brand’s existing tech stack to simplify marketing content generation so brands can easily generate the highest-performing digital marketing messaging they need to boost results. We combine custom, non-PII user attributes, and Persado’s award-winning language generation models to more effectively communicate with every customer across channels, at any stage of their journey.

Motivation AI is compatible with over 40 martech solutions to ensure each brand can use their existing martech stack to generate the most relevant, personalized outputs for their customers.

Content Delivery Platforms – Our processes and tech enablers are designed to streamline the configuration of Persado-generated content in your deployment platform

Customer Data Platforms – The platform facilitates a regular update of non-PII data with Persado as an input for relevant and personalized content generation

Analytics Platforms – We provide processes and data flows to seamlessly integrate results and reporting back into the Persado platform, supporting continuous learning and enhancing machine learning capabilities

Can you describe the process of onboarding a new client and how Persado’s AI helps in their campaign management and delivery?

Prior to formal onboarding, Persado ingests all relevant brand voice materials from its clients, such as style guidelines, information on segments, language restrictions, and more. This trains our model on how to write for a business’s particular brand on day one. We hit the ground running with a partnership kickoff to define KPIs and campaign focus areas as well as to educate users on Persado Portal, our centralized platform where all content is generated, approved, and deployed. In addition to hosting weekly check-ins during onboarding, we close out onboarding with an executive business review summarizing performance thus far and next steps.

Our teams help brands get the tone or brand voice correct across channels by grounding all of their outputs in emotion—a key element of language that motivates customers to engage. By leaning into the emotions and narratives most likely to resonate with each customer, brands can create more effective, revenue-driving campaigns while staying true to the brand’s values.

Scalability is one of the biggest ways we’re able to help businesses with their campaigns. Personalization is a key tactic for marketers to reach key audiences and attract new customers. However, true personalization is challenging to achieve at scale. Using Persado’s knowledge base of 1.5 billion real customer interactions, we help enterprises uncover which versions of a message resonate best with their customers, so they can personalize these messages in real-time at each stage of the customer journey.

You’ve worked with top banks and card issuers, driving significant revenue increases. Could you provide specific examples of how Persado’s AI has enhanced marketing performance for these clients?

Yes, while we work with many industries, we have deep experience working with 8 of the 10 largest U.S. banks and 6 of the 7 top credit card issuers. Here are a few examples of impact:

Chase has used Persado to generate and optimize marketing messages for consumers in its Card and Mortgage businesses. They have been using Persado since 2019 to write personalized market copy by analyzing massive datasets of tagged words and phrases. In pilot tests run by Chase, Persado AI-generated ad copy delivered click-through rates up to 450% higher than copy created by humans alone.

Ally Bank uses Persado to enhance cross-sell opportunities. Our Motivation AI platform has helped Ally understand which marketing communications resonate well with their customers across key channels like email and web. By knowing the do’s and don’ts related to targeted conversations with customers, the product marketing and CRM team are able to deliver a better CX and unlock double-digit improvement on KPIs like clicks and actual conversions.

How does Persado’s AI ensure that generated messages remain on-brand and comply with industry regulations, particularly for highly regulated sectors like finance?

As you noted, because sectors like financial services are highly regulated, it can be challenging to implement AI across business functions. In financial services and beyond, brand and legal compliance are a major piece of the AI puzzle. Although compliance and establishing AI governance can seem daunting, whether you’re part of a large enterprise or small business, it shouldn’t be a reason to not implement AI, or at least test it out.

To ensure copy is aligned with best practices and regulations, we ingest compliance and brand guidelines into Persado’s model. Our built-in tools allow for easy compliance and brand review, feedback, and approval before deployment.

We adjust our approach to help financial services brands remain compliant. While we can’t target specific demographics, such as age, for personalized marketing in financial services, we create high-performing narratives or emotional tones that resonate overall. From there, we observe which messages resonate with a bank or card issuer’s different segments.

What are some common challenges businesses face when trying to prove the value of AI, and how does Persado address these challenges?

There is a “opportunity lost” cost of enterprise inaction. A few changes in word choice can mean the difference between a completed transaction, application or enrollment and money being left on the table.

Persado’s impact is easily measured. We integrate with analytics systems and continuously evaluate success via automated A/B tests that show the performance of our more engaging, personalized content, vs what the brand initially created. And, we measure the difference via the conversion funnel. On average, Persado increases content performance 43%, compared to humans alone or another AI solution.

Our purpose-built AI is not only impactful, but easy to measure, which empowers business leaders to make better decisions about the technology investment—and quickly prove its value.

Given the rapid advancements in generative AI, what steps is Persado taking to stay ahead of the curve and maintain its industry leadership?

We’ve been leaders in AI for over a decade; long before it became popular following the launch of ChatGPT. As GenAI curiosity has increased across industries, we’ve been excited to bring and expand our marketing-specific capabilities among large enterprises needing a proven solution for creating high-performing, compliant messages at scale. We do this across channels as well: email, websites, social media, SMS/push notifications, and even IVR.

Our global product and customer success teams are continually listening to our customers—who are among some of the earliest, and most successful adopters of AI–and shaping our roadmap to help them deliver a stellar digital customer experience that also drives increased sales, loan application completions, on-time, payments, or other actions.

For example, we recently released new pre-built audience segments to speed personalized content generation for marketers across financial services, retail, and travel. This feature helps brands increase engagement with specific groups of customers by making it even easier and faster to generate marketing content that will resonate with customers.

What is your vision for the future of marketing and AI?

The possibilities for AI in marketing are only expanding. AI can serve as a helpful asset for marketers to enhance experiences and reach audiences in new, more personalized ways. I think we’ll see marketers shift from expecting (and using) GenAI to improve efficiency and productivity, to also ensuring AI tools deliver measurable increased performance.

Establishing AI governance and standards will also become more important as companies expand AI use cases with an eye on responsible AI. If they’re not careful, brands can risk not being compliant with regulations.

Companies will need to be vigilant and use guardrails to ensure models can be tested to ensure they are free of biases, and that content outputs are accurate, relevant, and on-brand. Applied properly, AI has the potential to turbo-boost marketing performance and customer experiences, which generates the most valuable benefit for businesses: increased revenue.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Persado.

[segretecose]

"i am 15% scandinavian 18% french 3% eastern europea-" okay well i will kill 100% of you

[mostly-natm]

can you draw bashir?

I can. The jury is still out on if I should.

[itellmyselfsecrets]

“There are plenty of accounts of hostility from men when women venture into supposedly gender-neutral shared exercise spaces. Like transit environments…Gyms are often a classic example of a male-biased public space masquerading as equal access.” - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)

[enterprise-bee]

constant war in my brain while watching TNG that goes like this:

one the one hand. fandoms having adult characters be “adopted” by other adult characters as a parent and child is a pet peeve of mine for how it forces those characters into roles that do not fit them and is frequently infantilizing. it doesn’t help that this is frequently done with characters that are neurodivergent coded in some way, stripping away their agency and competency in the name of a nuclear family archetype.

on the other hand. picard and crusher attending data’s first string quartet performance to support his interests and cheer him on… picard’s upset he got called away for the episode’s plot and couldn’t continue to support him… dad behavior.

[carcarrot]

nothing better than opening up instagram to see what those two silly guys are up to now

[mantisgodiveblog]

Against all odds, we have survived. We're taking a university course now, because the government will pay us for it and we do need the money, but it has unfortunately been eroding at our sanity somewhat, and we are learning nothing that we don't already know. We are, however, getting money.

We have somewhat of a backlog on Discord at the moment, as it doesn't have a daily upload limit and also it's easier to stick things on while we are being told things that we already know by people who are phrasing in in ways we find significantly misleading or incorrect (note: we don't use apps for things the vast majority of the time and if we access Tumblr via browser it immediately fucks up our formatting on PC, which can last several months). We will, hopefully, be posting these soon, but all is dependant on if we can actually scare up the time between courses to conglomerate that and fix any formatting errors in thoughts and such.

If that will happen any time soon... good question! Every time that our work practicum teacher opens her mouth, we take points of physical damage, and we don't think she understands the fact that getting back after we walk to a place also involves walking. We've had a lot going on for a while now and very little of it has been good. We're on new meds, and if the gods prove merciful, we won't have to tolerate this particular clown show past March. If there is no mercy to be found, however, we might have to keep doing this until June, in which case you can probably expect the quality of this to take a sharp downturn as the short time we have already spent in this program is already having immediate and catastrophic effects on our mental health.

We do not recommend going to university in any circumstances, but we are unfortunately aware that it may be necessary to get such things as a fancy piece of paper saying you are employable. Additionally, we would tell you to calibrate your expectations for anyone with a degree lower, but apparently what we consider the basic level of knowledge you should know before saying anything on any topic is everyone else's "bachelor degree and a bit", so our estimations on what people think is a high degree of knowledge to have are probably also off.

Any donations go to the Fund To Compensate Us For Having To Correct A Teacher Multiple Times In A Lecture And Then Looking Up Her Sources Later And Discovering They Are Blatant Misinformation. We are very tired. Please do research on things before talking about them. Thank you.

[jcmarchi]

Dave Bottoms, VP of Product at Upwork – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/dave-bottoms-vp-of-product-at-upwork-interview-series/

Dave Bottoms, VP of Product at Upwork – Interview Series

Dave Bottoms leads Upwork’s Marketplace organization, a global team responsible for the core Talent Marketplace, search and discovery, ads and monetization, core mobile experiences, as well as new product innovation and analytics.

Dave brings more than 20 years of Silicon Valley experience to Upwork. He joined the company in 2022 from Meta, where he led the Ads Manager Platform and Experiences team, responsible for the flagship enterprise product used by millions of small businesses and global advertisers to drive valuable business outcomes across Facebook and Instagram. Prior to Meta, Dave led the self-service customer growth team at Dropbox and multiple product teams at Yahoo!, including those for the Homepage, News, Sports, and other core media experiences.

Upwork began over two decades ago by pioneering a better way of working, helping businesses find more flexibility and connecting talent with more opportunities.

Upwork, a 20-year-old platform, is undergoing significant transformation under your leadership. What are the challenges and opportunities in driving innovation in such a well-established company?

It’s an exciting time to be at Upwork as we’re both driving a transformation across our products and platform, as well as leveraging AI tools to change how we work and build new capabilities and workflows. In many ways, we are a  mature, public company who’s operated through various incarnations and adoption cycles, but the new age of advanced machine learning and generative AI has been a tremendous boon to innovation and product solutions we’re able to deliver to our customers.

As with any major technological shift and especially during this period of AI expansion, challenges and opportunities emerge as new capabilities are born. At Upwork, we see AI as a force-multiplier for our platform and for the talented professionals who use it not only to augment work for clients – whether that’s coding, marketing, research or design – but also in getting started on that work faster. It’s also an accelerant for the businesses on our marketplace that are finding talent to drive to their true business outcomes more quickly.

One challenge is ensuring that the integration of AI into our products addresses real and substantial customer problems. We’re not just building or adding new features for the sake of providing something “new,” but truly leveraging the power of various AI models to drive increased efficiency and solutions for the freelancers and businesses that use our platform everyday. Fortunately, we are in an advantageous position to drive these outcomes with AI tools because of the tremendous amount of high-quality signal –from real-time behavioral data to rich, historical data – that we have amassed from a diverse range of specific work delivery that goes back many years. We’re using this data to train our custom large language models (LLMs), power many of our latest product experiences, and deliver the best work outcomes for our customers.

With your extensive experience at Meta, Dropbox and Yahoo, how has your approach to product management evolved? What lessons have you carried forward to your current role at Upwork?

My approach to product management has evolved to emphasize a balance between user-centric design and scalable innovation. There aren’t many places better than Meta for learning how to build products at scale and for a diverse range of users – Facebook and Instagram have billions of active daily users! In my role leading product for the Ads Manager Platform and Experiences team, I learned how to manage global, cross-functional teams building products that cater to both small and medium-sized businesses as well as large global agencies supporting Fortune 100 enterprises.

Additionally, my experiences at Dropbox and Yahoo were crucial in helping me develop a deep understanding of product-led growth mechanics for SaaS solutions, as well as content personalization and how to balance “big bets” across a portfolio of consumer media products. Both roles required a holistic understanding of product strategy and development from new product concept prototyping to launch and driving consumer adoption. I learned how to ship products and manage the teams that built those products.

Now at Upwork, I have the benefit of drawing on the last 15-years of Product Management experience to guide and steer innovation at a company that is reshaping the future of work. Without a doubt, the biggest challenge is how freelance talent and small to mid-sized companies grapple with how best to embrace and adopt the AI technology wave.

Across my previous experiences, I’ve seen some seismic technological shifts like the one we’re now seeing with AI –from the rise of social media to the shift to smartphones and the need for products to be mobile-first. While big technological shifts can mean big changes, at its core product development continues to be about doing one thing consistently well – solving customer problems. With the rise of AI, technological advancements are providing a huge opportunity to reinvent Upwork products so that businesses and talent work better together and produce stronger results. We’re starting to realize some early wins with our recent release of Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI.

How do you balance making small, medium, and big bets in AI product development, especially given the rapid evolution of AI technologies? Could you share an example of how this strategy has been implemented at Upwork?

AI product development requires a strategic blend of experimentation, scalability, and long-term vision. One core framework that I use in product planning that has been helpful in developing AI products at Upwork is what I like to call a VC-approach to product development, where I’m balancing a wide-range of portfolio products. About 40% of what my team is working on is big rocks or big bets that can have a very large impact on the business, but also are bigger risk items and take a considerable amount of time. The remaining 60% is split in half on near term items that I have high confidence the team will execute against the plan on, but likely won’t have a major ROI for the business and the other 30% is product work that keeps the lights on like fixing bugs. AI at Upwork is a big bet for us. It’s difficult from a development perspective requiring a high level of expertise, but the benefits can be massive and so we’ve allocated a healthy portion of our product focus to this area of work over the last year.

We launched job post generator, which is now powered by Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI, towards the end of last year as an example of a “big bet” product that came about through a process of experimentation from our in-house product incubation team, Upwork Labs, and scaled into a viable solution. With the rise of generative AI last year, the team explored a myriad ways to help our customers take advantage of the opportunity the new technology presented. We knew that clients often encountered the obstacle of starting with a blank page when describing their work needs. As such, we set out to determine how we could use generative AI to overcome this challenge. Last year, we announced a major expansion of our AI offerings including the launch of job post generator, which is an AI-powered generator of a job post that helps clients get a job post drafted in seconds.

How does Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI, differentiate itself from other AI solutions on the market, particularly in terms of enhancing the hiring and matching process for businesses and freelancers? 

AI models are only as powerful as the data that they are trained on. Uma is built on top of industry-leading large language models (LLMs) and customized with Upwork platform data, and it’s this customization that differentiates it from other AI solutions in our industry. Today, Uma powers a number of key experiences in the hiring and matching process that are critical to clients and freelancers discovering each other, getting started, and completing more high-quality work. We’re able to enhance these work actions because we have access to 20+ years of data, trillions of tokens of specific and highly relevant data from our two-sided marketplace that encompass a wide range of work interactions. Uma learns off these data points to serve as a constant, intelligent companion for our customers, helping businesses and freelancers every step of the way across the entire Upwork experience.

With features like Best Match insights and Upwork Chat Pro, how is Uma specifically tailored to help freelancers stand out and secure more projects? What feedback have you received from freelancers during the beta phase?

Powered by Uma, Best Match insights help businesses find the best potential person for their job quickly by identifying relevant insights like top proposals, client reviews, and skill alignment with a job post. From the freelancer’s POV, it specifically highlights projects that closely align with a freelancer’s skills and preferences therefore increasing their chances of being noticed by potential clients and finding work that best fits their expertise. With Upwork Chat Pro, Upwork’s work companion powered by Uma, freelancers have a dedicated chat app that helps them solve challenging tasks, boost productivity, and do their best work.

We’re excited about the progression of these key experiences and found that during early releases freelancers reported increased visibility and more targeted project matches, leading to higher engagement and success on our platform. Just this past quarter, daily active users of Upwork Chat Pro grew 68% quarter-over-quarter, and we’re seeing freelance professionals starting to land more work and earn more as a result.

How do you envision the future of work evolving over the next decade, particularly with the integration of AI and emerging technologies?

It’s hard not to see a future, at least in the near term, where AI becomes more and more embedded in our day-to-day work and lives. Businesses and professionals will continue to incorporate AI into their workflows and this will lead to increased productivity. It’s important to note that humans remain a crucial component of this future. As AI increasingly handles routine tasks and provides valuable insights on command, professionals will become faster, more efficient, and be able to do more. Jobs and skills will naturally evolve, as they do in most technological shifts. While some jobs may change or fade, many others will emerge, compelling humans to adapt. We are already seeing many traditional roles being transformed by automation, necessitating upskilling or reskilling, while new opportunities are arising in areas that complement AI, such as data annotation, curation, and AI security, to name a few. Humans will increasingly focus on tasks requiring emotional intelligence, creativity, critical thinking, and complex problem-solving—areas where human ingenuity excels. With AI taking on routine tasks, we will have the latitude to tackle more intricate, strategic, and pressing challenges within our organizations. It’s an exciting future and I’m proud to be at a company that is leaning in and leading at the forefront of its industry when it comes to AI.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Upwork. 

[bananonbinary]

god i miss when the internet wasn't garbage. you can't google anything these days without whatever answer you're looking for getting lost under a deluge of seo ai bullshit. cannot wait until the bubble pops and we might get useable search engines again.

[goldkirk]

I opened Pinterest for the first time in months.

That made me realize a lot about how bad I was actually doing and how much of a Waffle House Index use of Pinterest is for adult me, apparently.

I hadn’t realized it had grown that foundational to me in a healthy-brain-exercise-and-hobby-joy way. Nice to know moving forward! It’s another sign I can keep track of and use to spot correlation/indicator patterns earlier my behavior.

I love this kind of thing, it makes me so excited!

[moonilit]

I like to think Bruce have a journal, not as batman just as Bruce Wayne and you can see where he wrote all the headaches he gets from his kids

[brinnanza]

the fact that the genetic lottery rolled sensory processing issues severe enough that just regular chilling hanging out existing in my physical human body can be so overwhelming I am too exhausted to do basic tasks is a real fuckin snake eyes situation there is a lot about autism that I truly love and am genuinely grateful for but ripping all the labels off the sensory knobs and givin em a random spin is not fucking one of them

[meteorherd]

man i genuinely forget how often my field uses math sometimes. like i WISH the people who say psychology isn't "real science" were right and we just sat in a circle and talked about our feelings all day