Demand for AI skills is on the rise as Fiverr spikes searches for freelancers

With all the hype and excitement around generative AI technologies, there has been a corresponding growth in corporate interest in using artificial intelligence (AI).

While there is a lot of interest in figuring out how AI can be used to help a business, finding the right people to help an organization use AI effectively is not necessarily an easy task. It’s an area that has sparked a surge of interest in freelance marketplace Fiverr, with a 1400% increase in searches for AI-related services over the past six months.

Organizations are looking for individuals who can help them take advantage of a variety of AI technologies, including generative AI capabilities for image and text generation that can help improve marketing, sales, and operations. Fiverr has a history of helping organizations meet talent needs, growing strongly during the pandemic as demand for remote freelance skills accelerated.

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Fiverr now turning its attention to AI, today introducing a range of new categories to its freelance marketplace to help companies find the talent they need to take advantage of the power AI can provide.

“We have seen a trend of increasing searches for AI-related services,” Yoav Hornung, head of verticals and innovation at Fiverr, told VentureBeat. “We are also seeing more freelancers making offerings related to the generative AI world for the latest tools like ChatGPT, GPT-3, Midjourney, Dall-E and Stable Diffusion.”

Why do organizations actually want freelancers for AI from Fiverr?

Hornung explained that Fiverr is creating new categories on its service to help both organizations and freelancers connect. It is an approach that is not only about providing a specific category, but also about providing the right structure to help a company make a request to bring in the right skills to deliver a business outcome reach.

For generative AI, there is a growing demand for AI artists who are skilled at using the various tools out there.

“We’re really excited about services for AI artists because we’ve seen great things happen when there’s someone who really knows how to use those services,” he said.

Hornung said Fiverr has also seen an increase in companies trying to use or create products that use generative AI engines. To that end, he said companies are looking for skilled freelancers who can help them build AI-powered applications.

There is also a strong demand from organizations for help building prompts for generative AI engines. The prompt is essentially the question fed into a generative AI interface that “asks” the AI ​​to generate the desired output. According to Hornung, the ability to ask the right question with the right prompt is a skill that is in high demand on Fiverr.

The explosion in the use of generative AI text generation tools has also led to a new demand for freelancers to help organizations with proofreading and fact-checking.

“Until now, proofreading an article was one thing, and today proofreading or editing an AI-generated article is something else,” Hornung said.

Organizations don’t know what they want, but they do know they want AI

AI has been around for years, but in recent months, Hornung said awareness of AI has increased dramatically.

He said from his perspective until a few months ago many mainstream companies didn’t know what GPT-3 was, but now they know the name ChatGPT and realize they need to do something with AI. According to him, the organizations that were looking for AI a few months ago often fit a specific persona, such as those doing data science, but that is no longer the case today.

“AI is becoming more and more accessible,” he said. “Some just want it for the sake of AI, and some want AI because they know what kind of output it can generate if used correctly.”

That’s one of the issues Fiverr wants to help organizations with: some may not be familiar with the technical details, such as what model, machine learning (ML) approach, or large language model (LLM) they need to build something that does this. will benefit the company. Hornung said a business user might know that AI could potentially be an advantage, but not sure how. The category structure approach on Fiverr allows business users to ask questions and filter different AI examples and use cases.

“We are also starting to work on webinars to educate buyers and sellers about what AI can produce,” he said. “We want more companies to use the power of AI. We strongly believe in what it can do and how it can help businesses.”