Few leaders have a better real-time read on how AI is actually reshaping the workforce than Hayden Brown. As CEO of Upwork, the platform where 18 million freelancers meet the businesses that need them, she sees what the monthly jobs report can’t: which skills are surging, which jobs are quietly disappearing, and why 23% of businesses that moved work to AI are already bringing humans back. Brown shares what she’s actually seeing on the ground, and what the data says about the gap between AI hype and AI reality.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
The most recent monthly jobs report showed 23,000 jobs lost, but at the same time, unemployment numbers went down also. You guys recently released a Future of Work Index. Are there other things in that index that business news headlines maybe aren’t capturing?
While the picture overall is of this kind of slow-moving market, there are pockets within it that are incredibly vibrant. We really see the growth in AI-related skills, AI-related jobs. That is the place where energy and money is flowing. And we see it in our platform with our own AI category growing over 22% year-over-year. And just all of the data is telling us that the demand from both small businesses all the way up through large enterprises for talent who really know and can help them navigate this new world of work.
The dynamics are moving from full-time towards fractional work, which is a really fascinating trend. Our most recent survey showed a 10-point increase in freelancing in the U.S. within knowledge workers. It’s at 38% of the population today. It was at 28% just a year ago. So, there has been a huge step up in both workers moving into the freelance economy for a variety of reasons, but also businesses saying, “We want to find these workers who are out there doing contingent work because we don’t necessarily need the same number of full-time employees we needed before. We can approach this work differently”
There’s so much talk about AI potentially taking jobs, and there are some layoffs that companies attribute to AI, and yet you have other CEOs claim that AI is allowing them to add staffing because each AI-enabled person is more productive. It sounds like both fit in what you’re seeing.
It’s a very binary picture. There’s the camp of AI is going to take all the jobs, and humans and the companies that serve humans and do human solutions are doomed. And then, there’s the other side. The reality has to be somewhere in the middle. We do not see mass job destruction as the future. There is really, I think, a balance to be struck. But at the end of the day, it’s not all destruction. It actually is a lot of new jobs, and roles, and businesses that are being born because of this exciting technology.
I mean, there are contentions that some CEOs do AI washing. They ascribe to AI the reason why they have to make changes as opposed to owning that maybe they didn’t have the right strategy in the first place. But by blaming it on AI, they get credit for that. Their stock price goes up.
The AI washing that you’re talking about has been happening, but also, a lot of folks are now reconsidering and coming back because they’re seeing that the humans they let go, actually, they still need, and the AI can’t do all of the things that they hoped that it could do. A recent survey we did showed that 23% of our own clients have actually already moved work back to humans from AI or are about to do so. So, I think this pendulum will keep swinging. When we’ve actually done testing of clients trying to use agents directly to deliver work products through our platform, the failure rate of agents is incredibly high. They almost never succeed in delivering even fairly simple tasks from clients end to end. But when you just add a little bit of human expertise and a few back-and-forths with an expert, suddenly, the success rate goes up more than 70%. We have to sharpen our intuition around when to trust AI. And I think increasingly, people are realizing, I’m not going to take this at face value. I want to couple that with a valued human expert who can bring a lot more to that equation.
Your emphasis on freelance work and fractional work, as you talked about, there’s been a sort of romantic sentiment behind it, the promise of freedom and making your own schedule. In today’s economy, how much of that is a choice versus a necessity, a sort of a symptom, in some ways, of companies shifting risk onto individuals?
Absolutely both. 58% of current full-time employees are actually thinking about becoming freelancers for a lot of the reasons you mentioned around choice, and control, and deciding when, where, and for whom they work. We also hear really loud and clear from freelancers that the economics of freelancing have become much more appealing over the last few years. Before the 2008 Great Recession, people at that time, I think, felt they were very secure in a full-time job. And then, that recession happened, and they realized, wait a minute, I’m actually more secure if I have a portfolio of three to five clients on Upwork. They keep coming back to me for repeat work. Maybe I’m also doing a podcast, or a book, or a creator economy thing on the side.
And we really have seen this trend towards these portfolio careers. Gen Z is the biggest one. 42% of Gen Z are freelancing. It’s actually them saying, “Look, I feel more comfortable that I’m not exposed and that I can really both learn, and use, and build the skills I want, and also, have income that is predictable and in my control versus at the whim of an employer.”
It’s just a different conception of what a career is for younger folks, right?
Absolutely. And it also reflects, if you think about this AI moment, when everyone is trying to prove like, “I am an AI-relevant employee or worker,” freelancing is an amazing way to do that because they’re getting on-the-job experience, doing real work, proving their skills. Freelancers that have AI skills are earning 34% more per hour than folks who don’t have AI skills.
The urgency and the need for all of us, I mean, you, me, all of us to become fluent in using AI for our jobs, I mean, that is something none of us can escape. But what we do see is that freelancers, because this actually pays them and puts food on their table, they do it faster. They learn faster, they lean in harder, they move much more quickly to where the new technology is and learning its capabilities and applying those capabilities in real work settings.
We see this huge advantage actually with the freelance talent pool that’s well ahead of full-time employee counterparts in terms of their adoption and facility with AI. And that’s another reason why businesses are turning more and more to the freelance economy because they’re looking in-house, and they’re realizing my team doesn’t have these skills, and it’s going to cost a lot of time and money to try to get my team up a learning curve. Maybe I can short circuit that by bringing in freelancers who can both add value and do work, but also upskill my team at the same time as a byproduct of sitting side-by-side with them.
So, it becomes a backdoor way to train my own team at the same time.
Exactly. And not have to wait for those fruits to materialize before you start to actually see some real business benefit because a freelancer can be adding value in hours.
That is one of the big questions all of us have is how long does it take? What’s the best way to train people in the AI skills?
I was actually talking to one of our clients this morning and he said, “You can’t learn to ride a bike in a seminar.” And I think the same is true for AI. You could watch a YouTube tutorial and get more familiar, but at the end of the day, until you’re using these tools day in and day out, really integrating and pushing the boundaries of what they can do—that’s when I think people become extremely capable.