Meet Ranjan. He works at Deloitte by day and spends his evenings strapping a camera to his forehead, recording himself doing household chores by evening. He&#x27;s a physical AI trainer, a part of a growing gig economy built around creating training data to teach humanoid robots human behaviour.<br>Reporter Sakshi Sadashiv joins host Rachel Varghese to break down how this supply chain works: from gig workers in Delhi, to the firms like Tesla and Nvidia that eventually buy their footage from the companies that vet, annotate and package it for sale. And why this feels like a pattern India has been in before.<br>*Read Sakshi&#x27;s original story here.<br>*Take the Daybreak listener survey here.

A new class of gig-workers in India are teaching robots to do the dishes

Daybreak

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Daybreak

## Participants

- **Rachel Varghese** (The Ken)
- **Sakshi Sadashiv** ()
- **Sakshi Sadashiv** (GEN (Ground News))

## Transcript

So, before we start today, we have been thinking a lot lately about this show. About what it is, what it could be and about you, the people who show up for it every single morning. And we realized, we don't actually know that much about you. So, we have made this survey.

It takes about three minutes and we are genuinely asking what's working, what isn't and what you want more of. The link is in the show notes and we promise to read every single response. Okay, let's get into it. Ranjan is a 20-something employee at Deloitte.

But unlike most of his co-workers, his workday doesn't end at 5pm. Instead, when he gets home at 6.30, he showers, drinks coffee and then gets down to business. He straps a camera to his forehead and starts recording as he goes about his daily chores. Washing and folding laundry, cooking, doing the dishes. Once he begins though, he moves slower than usual. His movements are deliberate.

His hands never leave the frame. He can't record faces, idle for longer than 3 seconds or shoot in slow motion. These are the conditions of Ranjan's new gig. He is a physical AI trainer and for every task he does, he makes about 250-300 rupees. On good evenings, he even makes 1000.

He is part of a new class of gig workers who freelance for data collection companies like MicroOne, Ecodata, Human Labs and more to help train robots in human behavior. You may remember Pronto, the Bangalore-based home services startup that made headlines in May for allegedly sending workers equipped with cameras into customers' homes so that they could record similar footage for physical AI training.

Of course, Pronto's competitors like Urban Company and Snabbit rushed to reassure their own customers that they would not be doing the same. But backlash aside, it's important to note that Pronto did not create this market. It was already there.

In fact, companies like Tesla, Figure AI and NVIDIA, all building humanoid robots by the way, had been purchasing footage made by workers like Ranjan long before the Pronto controversy ever made the news. The thing is, this kind of labor supply pattern is not new to India. We saw it first with IT services. Then with the BPO or business process outsourcing model.

Each wave has brought the country employment and the opportunity to integrate into the global technology stack. Each wave has left India supplying the labor while others captured the intellectual property. To look at this wave more closely, I have with me in the studio my colleague Sakshi Sadashiv.

She has spent days reporting on this story, speaking to recruiters and workers across the country, studying listings sprinkled across sites like Indeed and Naukri.com. What she found suggests that this market is only picking up steam. Which means, this is the question. Is physical AI training just ...

A new class of gig-workers in India are teaching robots to do the dishes

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
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A new class of gig-workers in India are teaching robots to do the dishes

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.