Demand for AI skills on the rise as Fiverr searches spike for freelancers

With all the hype and excitement surrounding generative AI technologies, there has been a corresponding growth in the interest that businesses have in using artificial intelligence (AI).

While there is lots of interest in figuring out how to use AI to help a business, finding the right people to help an organization use AI effectively isn’t necessarily an easy task. It’s an area that has led to a surge of interest on freelance marketplace Fiverr, with a 1,400% increase in searches for AI-related services over the last six months. 

Organizations are looking for individuals that are able to help them take advantage of all manner of AI technologies, including generative AI capabilities for image and text generation that can help to improve marketing, sales and business operations. Fiverr has a history of helping organizations fill talent needs, growing strongly during the pandemic as demand for freelance remote skills accelerated. 

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Fiverr is now turning its attention to AI, today introducing a series of new categories to its freelance marketplace to help businesses find the talent they need to benefit from the power that AI can bring.

“We’ve seen a trend of increasing searches for AI-related services,” Yoav Hornung, head of verticals and innovation at Fiverr, told VentureBeat. “We’ve also started seeing more freelancers creating offerings that are related to the world of generative AI, for the most recent tools like ChatGPT, GPT-3, Midjourney, Dall-E and Stable Diffusion.”

Why do organizations want freelancers for AI from Fiverr anyway?

Hornung explained that Fiverr creates new categories on its service as a way to help both organizations and freelancers connect. It’s an approach that isn’t just about providing a specific category, but also about providing the right structure to help a company make a request to bring in the right skills to achieve a business outcome.

For generative AI, there has been growing demand for AI artists that are skilled in the use of the various tools that exist.

“We’re very excited about services for AI artists, because we’ve seen amazing things happening when there’s someone who really knows how to utilize those services,” he said. 

Hornung said that Fiverr has also seen a surge in companies trying to use or create products that use generative AI engines. To that end, he said companies have been looking for skilled freelancers that can help them build AI-powered applications as well.

There is also sizable demand from organizations for help building prompts for generative AI engines. The prompt is essentially the query that is entered into a generative AI interface that “prompts” the AI to generate the desired output. The ability to ask the right question with the right prompt is a skill that is in demand on Fiverr, according to Hornung.

The explosion in the use of generative AI tools for text generation has also led to a new demand for freelancers to help organizations with proofreading as well as fact checking.

“Up until now, proofreading an article was one thing and today, proofreading or editing an article that was generated by AI is different,” Hornung said.

Organizations don’t know what they want, but they know they want AI

AI has been around for years, but in the last several months, Hornung said that awareness of AI has risen dramatically.

He said that from his perspective, up until a few months ago, many mainstream businesses did not know what GPT-3 was, but now they know the name ChatGPT and they realize they need to do something with AI. In his view, the organizations that were looking for AI a few months ago often fit into a specific persona, such as those doing data science, but that’s no longer the case today.

“AI is becoming more accessible,” he said. “Some want it just for the sake of having AI, and some want AI because they know what type of output it can generate when being used correctly.”

That’s one of the issues that Fiverr is looking to help organizations with: some might not be familiar with the technical intricacies such as which model, machine learning (ML) approach or large language model (LLM) prompt they need to build something that will benefit the business. Hornung said a business user might know that AI can potentially be a benefit, but not actually be sure how. The category structure approach on Fiverr will enable business users to ask questions and filter different examples and use cases of AI.

“We are also starting to work on webinars around educating buyers and sellers about what AI can produce,” he said. “We want to see more businesses leveraging the power of AI. We strongly believe in what it can do and how it can help businesses.”