![\"This](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/4JN6X70_AFP__20260611__B36E6UC__v2__HighRes__TopshotIndiaTechnologyLabourAi_jpg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nBy Aishwarya Kumar, AFP<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\nDevelopers think feeding first-person footage, called “egocentric data”, into specialised AI models will help robots copy humans.
\nPhoto: AFP \/ R.Satish Babu\n<\/p>\n
With a smartphone strapped to her head, Indian housewife Nagireddy Sriramyachandra films herself slicing mangoes to train AI-powered robots to take on household jobs in the future.<\/p>\n
Earning just over two dollars for an hour of video, her mundane recordings are invaluable for global tech companies teaching machines how to move like humans in the real world.<\/p>\n
The 25-year-old is one of a growing army of thousands of AI system trainers in the world’s most populous country.<\/p>\n
“Who else will give you 250 rupees an hour just for doing housework?” said Sriramyachandra from her kitchen in Chennai in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state.<\/p>\n
“I may get a robot myself in the future,” she added.<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators crunch reams of digital data, but building systems to navigate real-life environments is more challenging.<\/p>\n
Developers think feeding first-person footage, called “egocentric data”, into specialised AI models will help robots copy humans.<\/p>\n
Some AI trainers work at home, others in factories or specialised studios – using video glasses, head-mounted cameras and motion sensors.<\/p>\n
“It blares ‘hands not detected’ when I’m not recording properly,” said Sriramyachandra, who sends recordings via a special app to the AI data company Objectways.<\/p>\n
The firm, which has offices in India and the United States, lists Fortune 500 multinationals as clients. It works with Amazon SageMaker, a platform for machine learning models.<\/p>\n
‘Better things’<\/p>\n
The humanoid robot market is booming, with investment bank Morgan Stanley predicting there could be over a billion in use by 2050, mostly for industrial and commercial purposes.<\/p>\n
“Folding clothes, coffee making… cooking a very specific thing, sandwich making,” Objectways head Ravi Shankar said, listing videos requested by clients.<\/p>\n
“Some jobs are supposed to be taken over, so humans can go and do better things.”<\/p>\n
In India, the emerging field of spatial AI is providing new employment — for now.<\/p>\n
![\"This](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/4JN6X70_AFP__20260611__B36E6VL__v2__HighRes__TopshotIndiaTechnologyLabourAi_jpg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\nIn India, the emerging field of spatial AI is providing new employment – for now.
\nPhoto: AFP \/ R.Satish Babu\n<\/p>\n
The 50-year-old chief exectuive is US-based, but hires workers from Tamil Nadu, where he grew up, one of India’s international technology hubs.<\/p>\n
At a Karur textile factory, busy with workers attaching labels to caps and ironing cloth bags, AFP saw eight people wearing head cameras and smart glasses supplied by Objectways.<\/p>\n
India has positioned itself as a global middleman for the creation, processing and annotation of AI data.<\/p>\n
“It’s likely that these data collection services will increase”, said digital labour expert Aditi Surie, from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru.<\/p>\n
Informal workers<\/p>\n
India is aggressively developing its AI industry, but its leaders are aware that, alongside the technology’s much-hyped benefits, automation poses risks.<\/p>\n
Government think-tank NITI Aayog said that most discussions around artificial intelligence and labour “focus on white-collar professionals and predict an almost certain loss of jobs in the segment” without urgent action.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
\nA worker wears a GoPro camera on his head recording actions through motion capture while folding towels inside a model bathroom at AI data company Objectways’ office.
\nPhoto: AFP \/ R.Satish Babu\n<\/p>\n
“Little attention, if any, is paid to how AI can serve India’s 490 million informal workers, the very people who form the backbone of our economy,” it said in a report released ahead of a global AI summit in India this year.<\/p>\n
The think-tank has examined how the technology could help or harm dozens of professions – from cobblers to sewer cleaners, farmers to tea sellers.<\/p>\n
For the last decade, 55-year-old Ponni has sat on a roadside in Bengaluru, the city known as India’s Silicon Valley, making flower garlands.<\/p>\n
She, too, has been paid to have a phone strapped to her forehead.<\/p>\n
“The next generation… who might have to do work similar to mine – they will face a problem,” Ponni said.<\/p>\n
Always wearing a camera<\/p>\n
At an Objectways studio, AI system trainers film themselves performing household tasks in fake, fully furnished apartment rooms.<\/p>\n
After several thousand hours of filming, the wallpaper is changed to provide clients with variety.<\/p>\n
“Today I sit here, tomorrow I stand there,” said engineering graduate Rani N., 21, on a break from filming herself, once again, folding a towel.<\/p>\n
Each video lasts about four minutes, and she records around 90 a day – on nearly every conceivable spot on the bed.<\/p>\n
She says the job is “tolerable”, but feels like she’s always wearing a camera.<\/p>\n
In other rooms, colleagues arranged pencil sharpeners, water bottles and crayons in patterns, recording with depth-sensor cameras.<\/p>\n
Qanat Consulting Services in Andhra Pradesh, an Objectways subcontractor, supplies about a dozen larger data firms with recordings.<\/p>\n
Some of its 2,000 contributors perform tasks with motion-sensor bands on their “wrists, hands and legs”, chief executive Thaslim Pattan said.<\/p>\n
Manish Agarwal of Bengaluru-based Humyn Labs, not related to Objectways, records conversations as well as videos.<\/p>\n
Contributors discuss assigned topics – ranging from politics to entertainment – for clients wanting to process speech patterns.<\/p>\n
Agarwal denies that robots will steal jobs, believing that networks of humans and robots “will work together” one day, he said.<\/p>\n
“A welder in India could be managing a welder-robot in Prague,” he said.<\/p>\n
– AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Aishwarya Kumar, AFP Developers think feeding first-person footage, called “egocentric data”, into specialised AI models will help…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,48,47,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45,145],"class_list":["post-471699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-audio","tag-current-affairs","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-podcasts","tag-public-radio","tag-radio-new-zealand","tag-rnz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}