With a smartphone strapped to her head, 25-year-old homemaker Nagireddy Sriramyachandra in Chennai, India, is filming herself slicing mangoes to train AI robots that could one day perform household chores. She earns 250 rupees (about $2.6) per hour for the recordings.
“Who else would pay you 250 rupees an hour just for doing housework?” Sriramyachandra said from her kitchen. “In the future, I might be able to buy a robot for myself.”
She is one of thousands of workers in the world’s most populous nation engaged in training AI systems. These recordings of everyday life are invaluable to global tech companies struggling to teach machines how to move and act like humans in the real world.
Unlike chatbots or image-generation software that require only digital data, building AI systems capable of navigating physical environments poses greater challenges. Developers believe feeding egocentric video footage into specialized AI models will help robots mimic human behavior.
Some AI trainers work from home, others in factories or dedicated studios, using video glasses, head-mounted cameras, and motion sensors. “The device alerts me with ‘Hand not detected’ when I’m not recording properly,” Sriramyachandra said, who sends recordings via a special app to an AI data company with offices in India and the U.S. and Fortune 500 clients.
The humanoid robot market is exploding. Forecasts suggest more than 1 billion robots will be in use by 2050, mainly for industrial and commercial purposes. India has positioned itself as a global intermediary in creating, processing, and annotating AI data.
“These data-collection services are likely to increase,” said Aditi Surie, a digital labor expert at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru.
Beyond the touted benefits, automation carries risks. Government advisory body NITI Aayog said most discussions on AI and labor “focus on white-collar workers and predict near-certain job losses in that segment” without urgent action. “Very little, if any, attention is paid to how AI could serve India’s 490 million informal workers, who are the backbone of the economy,” the NITI Aayog report stated ahead of a global AI summit in India this year.
Ponni, 55, has spent a decade on a Bengaluru roadside making garlands. She too was paid to strap a phone to her forehead. “The next generation ... people who may have to do the same work as I do, they will have problems,” Ponni shared.
