Trade jobs like plumbing are supposed to be among the hardest for AI to replace.
For Ania Smith, the CEO of Taskrabbit, that’s good news.
Taskrabbit, founded in 2008 by Leah Solivan, is a platform where gig workers can offer their services for a variety of tasks, from mounting a TV to repairing kitchen appliances.
It’s growing fast — and Smith sees AI supercharging the platform by providing it with more “taskers” who can do physical jobs that are harder for AI, and by improving how Taskrabbit’s marketplace works.
Taskrabbit’s revenue has grown by a factor of five over the past five years, and it’s betting on more growth ahead as AI pushes more people to trade jobs, Smith told Business Insider in an interview. Taskrabbit is privately owned and doesn’t report earnings publicly.
“Right now, it feels like there’s infinite room for growth,” Smith said.
AI has already led companies to cut white-collar jobs in tech and related fields.
But other jobs, including trade work like plumbing and electrical work, are less likely to be automated in the near future, experts have said. Some Gen Z workers have also turned to trade jobs as an alternative to higher education.
Taskrabbit centers its website around specific jobs. Users can request help by task category, such as “heavy lifting” or “electrical help.”
Furniture assembly is a popular category, especially since IKEA purchased Taskrabbit in 2017. Smith said the Swedish retailer accounts for just under a quarter of the company’s business globally.
Customers can submit their location and details about what they’re trying to do — such as moving out of their apartment in an afternoon — and Taskrabbit will suggest gig workers along with hourly rates and credentials. The platform lists about 175,000 gig workers, whom the company calls “Taskers.”
“A lot of our business is tied to things like moving or transitions in life,” Smith said. “Those things are not going to stop tomorrow.”
Other companies that operate marketplaces for trade work include Airtasker and Thumbtack.
Taskrabbit uses AI to match gig workers to jobs
As more people sign up to work for Taskrabbit, verifying that they can actually provide the services they say they can — and matching workers with the right jobs— becomes more important, Smith said.
Taskrabbit is now also using AI to read customers’ task requests and better match them with gig workers.
That’s more efficient than the old way of finding a match when “the Tasker and the client would chat for a while to really try to define the scope of the job,” Smith said.
It’s a huge difference from the early days of Taskrabbit, Solivan, the company’s founder, told Business Insider.
“I remember what a huge lift it was to produce those matching algorithms,” Solivan said. “When we hired our first data scientist, it would take weeks to go through location-based awareness, pricing, skills, and availability. It was a lot of data to crunch.”
Smith said Taskrabbit uses reviews from past jobs to show prospective customers “whether the person knows what they’re doing or not.”
AI tools such as ChatGPT also make it possible for people to learn and become experts at completing tasks like the ones available on Taskrabbit — another potential boon for the company going forward, Solivan added.
“It’s all at our fingertips now,” she said.
Do you have a story to share about the gig economy? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
Read the full article here
