New Study Tracks How Businesses Quietly Replaced Freelancers With AI Tools
- Reference: 0180827596
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/1735218/new-study-tracks-how-businesses-quietly-replaced-freelancers-with-ai-tools
- Source link:
The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp's Director of Applied Sciences, tracked firm-level spending data from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 across thousands of companies on Ramp's expense management platform. The share of total business spend going to online labor marketplaces fell from 0.66% in Q4 2021 to 0.14% in Q3 2025, while AI model provider spending rose from zero to 2.85% over the same period.
More than half the businesses that used freelance marketplaces in Q2 2022 had stopped entirely by Q2 2025. The cost dynamics are particularly notable. Firms most exposed to AI -- those that historically spent the most on freelancers -- substituted at a rate of roughly $1 in reduced freelance spend for every $0.03 in AI spend. A middle-exposure group showed a ratio of $1 to $0.30. The study uses a difference-in-differences design built around the launch of ChatGPT in October 2022 as a natural experiment. Stevens notes that micro-level substitution does not imply aggregate job loss, as demand for workers who build and maintain AI systems could grow faster than displacement.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.00139
Ping pong (Score:3)
We're just endlessly alternating between stories accusing AI of taking all the jobs, and studies 'proving' AI doesn't produce anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, in between the studies we get a lot of "AI" slashvertisements.
Re: (Score:2)
Both can be true.
AI can take jobs from those producing nothing and produce nothing itself.
I don't know if it's a win-win or a lose-lose.
Re: (Score:1)
Of course. Because both kind of stories get the clicks.
Re: (Score:3)
Most of the posts claiming either are marketing on one and denial on the other.
Many of us working for large companies know that AI started being introduced in ways that would not affect productivity, profit, employment, or GDP numbers —email summaries, Teams transcriptions, etc., Some things that are somewhat useful, mostly not.
We are now at a point where companies have started finding more "productive" uses. In part because the tools have gotten better, in part because businesses have had more
Unsurprising (Score:2)
A lot of consultants are little more than woo peddlers who happen to be old chums of some manager or VP at the company. An AI can hallucinate the same crap at a fraction of the cost. On the other end of the spectrum anyone you might hire through something like Fiverr is doing something simple enough that an AI can do with whatever prompt would have been given to a human and even if it's not quite as good the fact that it was being outsourced to Fiverr suggests it wasn't anything too important. Or at least i
Re: (Score:3)
> Or at least it shouldn't be unless a manager listened to some stupid consultants advise about saving money on mission critical aspects of the company.
Have you never worked in an office?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know if their statement can really be generalized in the way that they're generalizing it, but it did make me chuckle, because we currently have a set of consultants that can definitely be described as "woo peddlers who happen to be old chums of some manager of VP at the company"
Ramp? (Score:3)
What the heck is Ramp?
Bullshit (Score:2)
> Stevens notes that micro-level substitution does not imply aggregate job loss, as demand for workers who build and maintain AI systems could grow faster than displacement.
AI costs 3% of humans for the jobs being replaced... but we shouldn't worry because the other 97% will be made up by people hired to maintain thevAI?
That is so obviously wrong I hesitate to even call it math. The logic is so flawed I suspect Stevens is deliberately lying, a moron, or both. If you pay a human to maintain an AI syste
I fixed the headline (Score:2)
New Study Tracks How Businesses Quietly Replaced Poor Quality, Bottom of the Barrel Freelancers With AI Tools
And then they continvoucly morged it (Score:2)
So they had to hire the person from Fiverr anyways that cost less than 10% of the token spend for generating the incoherent slop in the first place.
To sum up (Score:2)
Get a real job .. like dentist .. mechanic .. AI will never replace you.
Every web-site is doing it (Score:2)
Judging by the lead photo with online news stories, every online paper is doing.
An article talks about storms in Georgia (USA), with associated photo of the recent storm in California. Storms aren't rare, it's difficult to believe that choosing a generic in-a-storm photo is difficult work. An article about a toxic electric generator inside a truck, with associated photo of a generator outside a truck. The story is more difficult to match to a stock image, I'll admit. Again, I think there will be plent
Same question (Score:1)
Will the tools still be worth it once these AI companies start charging for the real costs of this tech?
Re:Same question (Score:5, Interesting)
> Will the tools still be worth it once these AI companies start charging for the real costs of this tech?
The hope is likely that by the time they start charging what it actually costs, the businesses in question will forget that these jobs used to be done by humans at a specific cost. If they just raise the rates slowly enough, it will become a "required" budget line that simply increases year by year, and nobody will question the fact that in year 10 it's 400% more than it was in year one. I've certainly seen that happen with other tech that starts out affordable, gets entrenched, then becomes ridiculously expensive. And it becomes a habit until someone comes along with another disruptive "LOOK AT THE SHINY BAUBLE" tech to displace it. And AI is the current shiny bauble.