Artificial intelligence may be making some jobs obsolete but it has given a new lease of life to one group of people who play an unglamorous but critical role in the machine learning pipeline: first generation women workers in Indian towns and villages.
India is one of the world’s largest markets for data annotation labour. As of 2021, there were roughly 70,000 people working in the field, which had a market size of an estimated $250 million, according to the IT industry body NASSCOM. Around 60 percent of the revenues came from the United States, while only 10 percent of the demand came from India.