Crowd Computing Systems
Technology: A website that matches freelancers around the world to companies seeking to outsource, and artificial intelligence for assigning and evaluating the quality of the work.Why It's One to Watch: The company is harnessing a global shift toward a freelance economy, and its technology could change the way companies like banks handle outsourcing.Seeing a fundamental labor shift around what NYU professor Clay Shirky calls "cognitive surplus" (in which people use the free time they spend creating cat GIFs to do freelance work on the internet) got Crowd Computing Systems' founders, researchers at MIT, thinking. They had been studying artificial intelligence and its impact on financial fraud."We quickly pivoted that research and applied our artificial intelligence to managing this cognitive surplus, the ability to have an artificial intelligence engine not only distribute work to people around the world, but also judge the quality of the output of that work and deliver it to the enterprise," says Max Yankelevich, CEO and founder. "This was one of the biggest challenges we saw with that shift to the freelance economy. You don't have that person sitting there in your office to manage them closely. At the same time, now that you have access to many more people around the world, you have the ability to do more work on a much larger scale, parallelizing the work. You need computer aids like an artificial intelligence to do that, otherwise your management overhead would be tremendous."About 46% of Americans are full-time employees, Yankevelich estimates, the rest are freelancers. "The situation is similar around the world," he says. "By 2020, both Deloitte and Accenture are projecting much larger numbers in the freelance economy."The company has 20 million freelancers in its database. It matches workers up with work, evaluates the quality of that work and bases pay and future work assignments on the level of quality. The company's 50 employees, who work in New York and Newark, N.J., are mostly engineers.The company plans to quadruple its sales and marketing staff in the coming year.In early October, Crowd Computing was getting ready to announce a deal with a large financial information provider. Investment banks, which are already heavy users of business process outsourcing, are among the company's clients, as are online retailers and consumer goods companies.Traditional banks should come on board later, Yankelevich says. "They seem to be more conservative."For slideshow and full story, visit American Banker.