How Cloud Workers Enable Modern AI Applications with Mark Sears

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Mark Sears is the Founder and CEO at CloudFactory, a global leader in combining people and technology to provide a cloud workforce solution for data labeling. Their managed teams have experience with 150+ AI projects and can process data for machine learning and core business functions with high accuracy using virtually any tool, even customer-built tools. As an impact sourcing service provider (ISSP), CloudFactory creates economic and leadership opportunities for talented people in developing nations. 

Trusted by 140+ companies, They annotate data for 11 of the world’s top autonomous vehicle companies and process millions of tasks a day for innovators including Microsoft, Drive.ai, Ibotta, and nuTonomy. They’re on four continents, with offices in the U.K., U.S., Nepal, and Kenya. His innovation drives the vision of connecting 1 million people in the developing world to online work. More than just connecting people to work CloudFactory works to develop leaders worth following – men and women of high character and high competency who serve their communities. 

Episode Links:  

Mark Sears’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/msears/ 

Mark Sears’ Twitter:  https://twitter.com/marktsears?s=20 

Mark Sears’ Website: https://www.cloudfactory.com/ 

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Outline: 

Here’s the timestamps for the episode: 

(00:00) – Introduction

(02:29) – Some good  talent is not well-connected in the global economy. CloudFactory built a technology platform to coordinate these really talented young people to connect them to the global economy.

(05:22) – Becoming really efficient and effective with training.

(05:47) – Hybrid workforce. Some of our workforces are working distributed. Some of them are working in one of our managed offices.

(06:52) – The Pomodoro technique for productivity.

(09:29) – CloudFactory exists to connect a million people to online work and we exist believing that talent is equally distributed around the world, but opportunity is not. So it starts and it ends with making sure that we are trying to create good opportunities.

(12:04) – It’s that human in the loop that has both sides of training and augmenting that you see a huge amount of need for scalable people, people who can really do high quality work within a very tech forward friendly way.

(13:39) –  Advantages related to data which is being touched by humans in the loop. When you do that at scale, because you’re a tech company, you need access to a large, scalable high quality workforce.

(18:31) – Tool agnosticism: Customers want to own the data work tools.

(25:45) – Setting people up for success and selecting the right profiles and personas of people that can really get over the hump and join the digital economy.

(27:15) – Kathmandu and Nairobi have fully digital and English proficient talent and they are hungry and looking for opportunities to really grow and also to connect.

(30:05) – From the smaller startups to the biggest companies in the world, everyone’s recognizing that the world is more connected than ever, and talent is all over.

(31:47) – Trying to train up your AI and fill the gaps of your AI and technology with inserting humans in the loop.

(34:22) – CloudFactory is a custom partner and is working on many different applications and ideas.

(36:12) – It’s becoming very effective and also more enjoyable for people to have the flexibility of being able to work from anywhere.

(38:26) – There’s no question that the future of work is human and machine intelligence finding the right mix of both.