How to learn from Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a platform created by Amazon that serves as a marketplace for small tasks that need to get done. If your business has thousands of hours of audio that you need transcribed. If your organization wants to double check the results of a computer vision experiment, against a third party, Amazon Mechanical Turk can show your data set to however many people you want to pay for validation. Amazon Mechanical Turk lets people list tasks, that may in the future be completed by artificial intelligence, to be completed by people that get paid for their work.

As Amazon describes, “Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development.

While technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as moderating content, performing data deduplication, or research. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce, which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale, or have gone undone. Crowdsourcing is a good way to break down a manual, time-consuming project into smaller, more manageable tasks to be completed by distributed workers over the Internet (also known as ‘microtasks’).”

How can your small or future new business learn from Amazon Mechanical Turk? The experience of someone listing a microtask on MTurk is as if an artificial intelligence was completing the work and reporting back to the creator of the job. The reality is that, based on the job specifications, Amazon took that information and listed it to a workforce, who then completed the task. This completed work is then sent back to the job creator, seamlessly and seemingly automatically.

This principle can be applied to many other technologies that people use every day. What is Uber but an app that connects someone to a driver, who then drives that person to where they want to go? What is AirBnb bus a website that shows you places in the real world that you can stay a weekend at? If you order groceries online, doesn’t that set off a local supply chain of people fulfilling that order?

If you aren’t familiar with technology or someone that codes, then technology can seem elusive and magical. Uber can seem like an impossibly difficult concept because of how novel it is to be able to request a taxi service on demand, when the previous non-tech version had such a difficult user experience. Airbnb can seem like an experience of wonder booked from your phone, teleporting you to a fully lived in environment, when you’re really just traveling in a new way. Ordering groceries online is so easy that you can forget that the simplicity is made by several people shopping, packaging and hand delivering your goods.

So what does this all mean for your business? If you’re a small business, a business that hasn’t started yet, or a not-yet-tech-enabled business, ask yourself this question: what simple tech can be used to make my business seem high tech?

If you’re a retail boutique on Main Street, you can very simply bring your live inventory online and make your physical store shoppable from anyone in your community’s computer or phone. If you’re a food truck with a knockout bestseller, you can create a subscription meal service for regular customers. Maybe you want to make a local marketplace for personal trainers, but don’t know how to code. Couldn’t you just make a webpage with an application form, hire trainers, then make an e-commerce website that lists the profiles of your new hires?

To tech enable your business, create a new tech platform, or just start a business online, you don’t have to have years of expert coding knowledge or a team of elite computer programmers on staff. A lot of the work has already been done by the people who made platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, social media, and the tools that work with these platforms. All you need to do is to be able to think about your business creatively, and ask yourself what you want to get done. Then break that down into tasks, and see what online tools are available to achieve those goals. If your business isn’t online yet, how are you going to start?