New Delhi: AI agents are beginning to employ individuals to work in the real world. The recently launched RentAHuman platform allows artificial intelligence to find human workers to perform physical work, which reverses the standard AI workflow.

Rather than humans relying on AI to complete tasks, AI has created job advertisements and remunerates human beings to do them. Grocery runs to pick up kids at a location are all the way to the physical layer of digital agents, where the system is treating people like the physical layer, a concept that is already raising eyebrows in tech circles.

What is RentAHuman and how does it work?

RentAHuman is a basic marketplace. The humans register, look around, charge their own fees, and take up jobs that they are comfortable performing. The kind of work varies between minor favors and face-to-face demands like showing up to meetings or delivering something.

It was designed by a crypto engineer of UMA Protocol, Alexander Liteplo. Liteplo claims that the objective is to assist AI agents to unload tasks that they cannot do in the real world.

Pay varies by task. Certain gigs pay only a couple of dollars. Others go up to about $69. Initial figures indicate that there is an eye-opening disparity: tens of thousands of humans have registered, and only a few AI agents are advertising jobs.

Built by AI, for AI

In the background, Liteplo claims that the site itself was primarily developed with the assistance of AI-based agents when coding in circles, and the models of Anthropic assisted in the process of assembling the product. That is, AI was used to create a system where AI is now able to hire individuals.

Although having crypto origins, RentAHuman is not going to introduce its own token. Liteplo has expressed that a token would create pressure and financial risk for the users, which is a significant decision in an industry where new platforms frequently fail to provide crypto incentives.

A glimpse of an AI-managed workforce

RentAHuman is one of the wider movements of AI-first experiments machine-centric tools, not human-centric. There are already some such projects that have sounded security and privacy alarms. RentAHuman seems more refined, yet it also makes one reconsider the work and agency.

As soon as an AI assistant is able to conclude that it requires a human, determine a price, and recruit one immediately, the distinction between a helper and a manager begins to blur. In the meantime, the platform itself is more of an experimental project than a large-scale product. However, it provides a good glimpse into what the world may become with AI, which does not merely assist people; it coordinates them.