Indian Workers Film Daily Tasks To Train Physical AI Systems

Mohammed Ashim straps a small camera to his head before he starts cutting hair and trimming beards in Bengaluru, a routine he has followed for four years, according to BBC News. The camera records only his hands and fingers; his clients' faces are blurred out. He wears it five to six hours a day, and the footage he generates is sold to technology companies training artificial intelligence systems meant to control robots in the physical world.

"The routine is simple, but you have to be disciplined about how you move," Ashim, 22, told the BBC. "The operations team taught me that 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."

What Is Mohammed Ashim's Job Now

Ashim is one of hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide now paid to record themselves performing everyday physical tasks, the BBC reports. His footage is collected by a local company and resold to technology firms and research organizations developing what the industry calls "physical AI" — systems designed to let robots navigate real environments rather than simulated ones. "It's good money, but honestly, the feeling of doing something this futuristic is what keeps me excited," Ashim said. "I never imagined my razor techniques would be useful to a global tech company."

How Much Do Workers Get Paid

Rashdan Technologies, one of the firms that collects and processes this footage, pays $5 to $10 for eight to 10 hours of recorded work, according to co-founder and chief executive Shahil Baig, who spoke to the BBC. "For a lot of these people, that's meaningful," Baig said. The company works with hundreds of people filming their own labor and sells the resulting video to buyers seeking footage of specific tasks. "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," Baig told the BBC. "We go wherever the task is."

Why Do AI Companies Need This Footage

Robots cannot be trained to operate in the real world using computer simulations alone, Manish Agarwal, founder of Humyn Labs, another data-collection firm, told the BBC. Most of the data his company gathers comes from video, though collectors sometimes wear hardware on their hands and fingers to capture physical contact directly. "Physical tasks require high-quality signals involving limb movements, fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders and dynamic force application," Agarwal said, citing as an example the correct grip force needed to handle a plastic bottle without crushing it.

How Is Worker Privacy Protected

Baig said consent and comfort are central to how Rashdan Technologies operates. "We record hands, not faces, and where multi-camera rigs do capture more of the body or environment, we blur faces out," he told the BBC. "No names, no contact details, nothing that identifies them personally goes into what we hand off." But the demands from buyers are escalating. "Now clients are asking for four to six cameras rigged around a person's head to cover the entire scene, not just the hands," Baig said. "Getting someone to agree to one small camera is one conversation. Getting them to agree to wearing what's effectively a five-camera headset is a completely different, and harder, one. We pay more for that tier of data collection because of what we're asking of people."

How Fast Is This Industry Growing

Agarwal expects dozens more competitors to enter the Indian market for human-generated training data this year, according to the BBC. The expansion reflects rising demand from robotics companies and AI labs for footage of granular, real-world physical tasks that cannot easily be manufactured inside a simulation. For workers like Ashim, that demand has turned ordinary labor — a haircut, a trim, a steady hand with a razor — into a commodity with buyers thousands of miles away. Whether the pay and privacy protections keep pace with that demand remains an open question as more firms compete for the same workers and the same footage, the companies involved in the trade told the BBC.