In the growing field of data labeling, workers in a small town in southern India are training artificial intelligence to improve how it performs tasks traditionally done by humans.
Evidence of the AI boom often appears in the form of vast, windowless data centers housing thousands of devices and servers. But in the southern Indian city of Karur, the rise of AI is being seen in another form – in the people working in the industry.
Hundreds of tech lab workers line the city streets during their coffee breaks on weekdays. Most are young men and women in their 20s, wearing job cards around their necks. Others work a few hours on weekends from home to earn extra income. They work in a growing sector of artificial intelligence, where people help prepare data to train AI systems. For now, the process still requires human intervention. Workers analyze data and video, identify errors, and tell the system what’s happening so it can learn and improve. The work helps develop software that’s used to run self-driving cars, automate production lines, and manage inventory in stores.
The work is often repetitive and less complex than what engineers are trained for in university. It requires hours in front of a screen, analyzing video frame by frame. But as artificial intelligence is changing the way companies design and manufacture products, and even eliminating jobs, this industry is showing how countries like India are adapting to this new reality.
Aiswarya Palaniswamy, 25, with a master’s degree in data analytics, landed a job last year at Karur-based Objectways Technologies. The company prepares data for artificial intelligence systems, and its clients are mostly American companies that use AI in their products. Objectways has about 2,600 employees, and in the past month alone it has hired 300 people. Palaniswamy says she believes she has found a job that can be sustainable, even as AI is automating jobs like payroll processing and data entry that were previously done by workers in India. She and her colleagues analyze footage recorded by products in the growing field of physical artificial intelligence, including self-driving cars and humanoid robots. They review every frame of the video and note how well the AI model is performing its task.
ECONOMIC BENEFITS
Jobs for young, skilled workers at Objectways pay around $210 to $260 a month. For a small Indian city like Karur, with a population of around 440, that’s a good salary. Meanwhile, the simplest job, which consists of recording yourself from home, pays around $2.50 for every hour of video that can be used and performed independently.
In India, creating sustainable jobs for a growing young population is a particularly important issue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party. About 2 million Indians turn 18 every month. The lack of opportunities for young people was one of the reasons that fueled recent protests over education. Modi, who has promised to lead India into a new era of prosperity and modernization, made a rare shake-up and replaced the education minister. But resentment over the lack of jobs for graduates with professional skills remains elusive. While companies like Objectways do most of the work for companies outside India, Modi’s government wants to develop domestic AI companies. It says this would bring greater economic benefits to the country.
- Krishnan, who heads India’s Ministry of Information and Technology, said India has the potential to tap its largest resource — its 1.4 billion people — into artificial intelligence sectors that require specific human skills. That could include tasks like translating the many languages spoken in India or monitoring patients in intensive care units. He said Indian companies are already providing such services.
Krishnan warned that India should avoid creating too many jobs in the artificial intelligence sector that could disappear as quickly as those in the administrative services sector. According to him, the country should focus on creating higher-value jobs. A 2025 report by an Indian government research institute estimates that up to 1.5 million jobs in the information technology and services sector could disappear as a result of the advancement of artificial intelligence.
The areas where artificial intelligence can increase efficiency are numerous. The opportunities for new businesses are equally vast. Puneet Jindal, founder and CEO of Labellerr, a company that prepares data for AI systems in the state of Punjab, says that as artificial intelligence is used in more and more products in the office and at home, the need for data from people with different backgrounds and experiences, collected in different languages, will also increase. “India is one of the most diverse countries in the world, and people have very different ways of working,” Jindal said. “The scale of the opportunities that India can offer is enormous.”
That’s especially important in the emerging market for robotic devices, designed to perform tasks that humans do today. At Objectways’ Karur labs, which two New York Times reporters visited in July, many employees spend their days preparing data for a humanoid robot designed to perform various household chores. Other projects include a device that could help blind people by telling them audibly what’s around them.
On a recent morning, in a special test kitchen, an employee was checking out a pair of robotic grippers equipped with cameras. Objectways recorded and then analyzed the footage to see how the robots performed various household tasks, such as picking up dishes, opening a water bottle and pouring water into a glass, and arranging food. The same tasks were repeated in the lab’s bathroom and bedroom.
“We give the robot the data and tell it, ‘Learn from it,’” said Ravi Rajalingam, founder and CEO of Objectways. He became interested in the field after working with a lending company to streamline the application process through artificial intelligence. In 2019, he founded Objectways in his hometown of Karur, seeing an opportunity to offer jobs to fresh graduates. His wife hired the company’s first 20 employees, he said. “India is no longer just the back office of the world,” Rajalingam said. He acknowledged that many of the jobs at his company don’t require an engineering degree, but added that the work is technical and employees can learn about artificial intelligence models. Many of them, he said, gradually advance to more senior positions.
INVESTMENTS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Mohamed Afsar, 29, is one of them. He has been promoted and now oversees 600 employees working on the company’s projects at its offices in Coimbatore, a larger city about two and a half hours west of Karur. “It’s a huge process and we need a lot of people,” he said. Afsar, who grew up in the area and was the first in his family to go to university, said 200 people can process about 70 hours of video a day, recorded by robots or self-driving cars. But that’s still less than the amount the company needs to analyze, as customers send it about 1,000 hours of video every day.
Analysts estimate that the industry could add up to $10 billion to India’s economy by the end of this decade. However, the sector is still too small to convince economists and policymakers that it can give India a significant edge in the race to develop artificial intelligence. Some of Asia’s largest economies have been slow to invest in artificial intelligence. India, in particular, has been labeled a laggard. According to a Morgan Stanley report, the country did not launch its first major initiative to develop artificial intelligence until 2024, when the government announced a five-year plan worth $1.25 trillion. This late start meant that India had less opportunity to absorb the loss of jobs in the technology sector that were lost as artificial intelligence took over.
At Objectways, the new employees seem content, at least for now, with their role as humans helping with an important part of the robot development process. Hari Prasad, 25, said that when he graduated with a degree in engineering last year, he never imagined his job would involve something resembling science fiction.
“If someone had told me that in 10 years a robot would be bringing you coffee, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. But today, his job is to help make that a reality. “We need a human to train the robot,” he said with a smile. (New York Times)