Mohammed Ashim has cut hair and trimmed beards in Bengaluru for four years. These days, he does it with a camera strapped to his head, recording only his hands — his clients' faces blurred out — for a global AI industry hungry for footage of real human work.
"The routine is simple, but you have to be disciplined about how you move," said Ashim, 22. "My hands always have to stay cleanly inside the frame, the lighting has to be sharp, and I can't tilt my head too abruptly while working." He wears the camera five or six hours a day. "It's good money, but honestly, the feeling of doing something this futuristic is what keeps me excited."
Training 'physical AI'
Ashim is one of hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide being paid to record their own labour, footage that is sold to technology companies and research labs training so-called physical AI — systems designed to control robots navigating the real world. Rashdan Technologies, one firm that collects and processes such footage, pays $5 to $10 for eight to 10 hours of recorded work. "Every robotics company, every frontier AI lab, has a specific kind of data they want: industrial tasks, agriculture, household chores, small business work like pottery, garment-making, embroidery, candle-making," said co-founder Shahil Baig. "We go wherever the task is."
Baig said his company blurs faces and strips out identifying details, but that clients are increasingly demanding more invasive capture — four to six cameras rigged around a worker's head rather than a single hand-level lens. "Getting someone to agree to one small camera is one conversation," he said. "Getting them to agree to wearing what's effectively a five-camera headset is a completely different, and harder, one."
Manish Agarwal, founder of rival data firm Humyn Labs, argues the work can't be replaced by computer simulation. "There is no existing internet archive of embodied human activity — no dataset of a kitchen being cleaned, or a car being assembled by hands that know exactly how much force to apply," he said. His company now has 96,000 data collectors across Latin America and Southeast Asia, and Baig expects dozens of competitors to launch in India this year alone as demand for the raw material of robotics keeps climbing.