LinkedIn tests AI labour marketplace

LinkedIn is testing a marketplace that pays professionals to train artificial intelligence systems, pushing the job site deeper into paid expert work. (businessinsider.com) LinkedIn confirmed to Business Insider that the product is in early testing and that some projects could pay as much as $150 an hour. The reported assignments cover subjects including coding, nursing, and finance. (businessinsider.com) The work is the human side of model-building: people review answers, label data, and write or score examples so chatbots learn what a good response looks like. LinkedIn said members can express interest, but the company checks whether their profiles show the right expertise for each task. (linkedin.com) (socialmediatoday.com) For specialized projects in law, medicine, or finance, LinkedIn says it can use profile details such as education, licenses, and work history, plus an artificial-intelligence-led interview, to decide whether someone fits a project. LinkedIn says that conversation data can also be used to suggest profile updates. (socialmediatoday.com) That moves LinkedIn closer to companies such as Mercor, Surge AI, Appen, and Outlier, which already sell pools of screened contractors to artificial intelligence builders. Outlier says more than 700,000 experts have joined its platform, while Appen markets remote work for data collection and labeling. (businessinsider.com) (outlier.ai) (crowdgen.com) LinkedIn has a built-in advantage those startups do not: its member profiles already organize work histories, skills, licenses, and professional networks at global scale. The company’s Economic Graph team said in May 2025 that LinkedIn had more than one billion members. (oecd.ai) The timing lines up with LinkedIn’s own labor data. A January 15, 2026 World Economic Forum article citing LinkedIn data said artificial intelligence has added 1.3 million jobs, including roles such as data annotators, even as global hiring remains about 20% below pre-pandemic levels. (weforum.org) LinkedIn has been moving in this direction for months. In October 2025, the company described the program as a way for members to earn “flexible, skill-based income” by helping create human-labeled data for artificial intelligence training. (socialmediatoday.com) The open question is whether LinkedIn keeps this as a niche freelance product or turns it into a larger hiring business tied to Microsoft’s artificial intelligence push. For now, the company is testing whether a professional profile can double as a worker screening system for the chatbot economy. (businessinsider.com) (socialmediatoday.com)