The Indian workers filming their work to train AI

In Bengaluru, 22-year-old Mohammed Ashim has spent four years cutting hair and trimming beards. Lately he’s doing it with a camera strapped to his head. The lens only catches his hands and fingers; clients’ faces are blurred out. It is careful, awkward work, and the instructions are exact: keep your hands in frame, keep the lighting right, don’t jerk your head around.

Ashim wears the rig for five or six hours a day. The money matters, he says, but so does the novelty. For him, the strange part is not the camera. It’s the idea that razor technique picked up in a neighbourhood barbershop might end up useful to a global tech company.

That footage is feeding a growing business. Local firms collect video of people doing everyday tasks, then sell it to technology companies and research groups training what’s being called physical AI — systems meant to control robots in the real world. Rashdan Technologies, one of the companies in this market, says it goes where the task is, from industrial jobs to agriculture and domestic work, including pottery, garment-making, embroidery and candle-making. Its co-founder and chief executive, Shahil Baig, says it pays $5 to $10 for eight to 10 hours of recorded work.

The data is becoming more demanding to collect. Some clients now want four to six cameras around a person’s head to capture the whole scene, not just the hands. That raises the bar for consent and makes the pitch harder. Another company, Humyn Labs, says it needs material from a wide range of factories, tasks and geographies because a robot meant for US homes or factories needs data that looks like those environments. It says it has 96,000 data collectors across Latin America and Southeast Asia.

There’s also a blunt economic reality underneath all of this. Workers are being paid a little to document the motions of their own jobs, while the value sits farther up the chain, in the software and standards that turn raw video into training data. Manish Agarwal, who founded Humyn Labs, argues India cannot stay just a supplier of footage; it has to own the pipeline that cleans, structures and validates it. Meanwhile, workers like Mohammed Arman in textiles and Jolly Arifur, a science teacher who films domestic chores from home, are taking the extra cash because it fits around the lives they already have.