LinkedIn tests AI labour market

LinkedIn is testing a marketplace that pays professionals to train artificial intelligence systems, with some roles listed at up to $150 an hour. (businessinsider.com) Business Insider reported on April 13 that LinkedIn confirmed the early-stage test and said the work includes helping chatbots improve in coding, nursing, finance, and other specialist fields. GuruFocus reported the test on April 14 and said LinkedIn is framing it as an “AI workforce market.” (businessinsider.com) (gurufocus.com) The reported pay bands run from about $40 an hour for some projects to $150 an hour for senior software-engineer trainer roles, with lower-paid “red teaming” jobs focused on probing model failures. Other reported openings target Excel, finance, nursing, and language specialists, including Germanic and Nordic languages. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) (lokmattimes.com) AI training work is the human side of building chatbots: contractors write sample answers, rate model responses, and flag mistakes so systems learn what good output looks like. Surge AI says it provides reinforcement learning from human feedback and language-data annotation, while Mercor says it supplies experts for frontier research, human-feedback data, and agent training. (surgehq.ai) (mercor.com) LinkedIn is moving into a market that has been built mostly by specialist firms rather than job boards. Business Insider said LinkedIn’s test would put it up against startups including Mercor and Surge AI, both of which already sell human training work to artificial intelligence companies. (businessinsider.com) (surgehq.ai) (mercor.com) The timing lines up with Microsoft and LinkedIn’s recent argument that artificial intelligence is changing white-collar work faster than employers can hire for it. Their 2024 Work Trend Index surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries, and the 2025 edition said 82% of leaders viewed that year as pivotal for rethinking strategy and operations around AI. (news.microsoft.com) (microsoft.com) LinkedIn has spent the past two years pushing deeper into workplace AI through hiring tools, learning products, and labor-market research. A trainer marketplace would turn that data-and-recruiting position into a way to broker task-based expert work directly on the platform. (blogs.microsoft.com) (microsoft.com) The business is attractive, but it has also exposed risks around contractor screening, data handling, and client secrecy. Business Insider reported this month that Meta paused work with Mercor after a security incident, underscoring how sensitive training pipelines have become for major model developers. (aol.com) (msn.com) For now, LinkedIn is describing the effort as a test, not a broad product launch. The immediate question is whether the company keeps this as a niche market for high-skill trainers or opens a larger layer of paid AI piecework inside the world’s biggest professional network. (businessinsider.com) (gurufocus.com)