Today we’re excited to reveal the Fall 2024 edition of Upwork Updates, our semi-annual product showcase highlighting a collection of innovative products, features and partnerships across the world’s work marketplace.
Uncertainty in the workplace is understandable because of the rapid adoption of AI-powered tools and technologies, a shifting job market, and macroeconomic challenges. To help our customers navigate that uncertain terrain, Upwork Updates: Fall 2024 unveils powerful offerings designed to help businesses and talent leverage cutting-edge technology to achieve high-quality work outcomes today.
With the introduction of Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI, our Spring 2024 Update focused on embracing and utilizing generative AI for our customers. As part of our Fall Update, we’re highlighting the advancement of Uma’s capabilities and beginning to show what’s possible when our customers work with a powerful AI companion within the Upwork ecosystem.
In our Fall 2024 Update, we’ll show you where and how we’re changing the customer journey to meet every business need with AI and the best talent on Upwork.
Delivering better work outcomes with Uma-powered Managed Services
While hundreds of thousands of businesses come to Upwork for on-demand hiring today, our goal is to make Upwork the platform where these same businesses (and many more) can also come to achieve work outcomes on-demand.
We’re expanding Uma’s capabilities across the Upwork experience, leveraging AI to further enable the end-to-end delivery of work outcomes for clients. Uma, trained on rich historical signals from the Upwork platform, will now be utilized by the teams behind Upwork Managed Services, our fully managed offering that guarantees project outcomes. Uma will be used to more efficiently scope projects, evaluate skills, and design the ideal teams of experts to deliver business-critical work outcomes faster and with higher quality.
All Upwork Enterprise clients have access to Managed Services, which provide intricate business solutions for a wide range of work areas like customer service, human resources, and sales. To quickly meet our customers’ expanding AI requirements, Upwork Managed Services now offers fully managed AI services, such as the creation of bespoke AI agents to support internal operations. Uma helps Upwork’s Managed Services team quickly vet and identify top AI professionals, such as skilled data labelers or high-quality AI and machine learning engineers, when a client asks to build an AI chatbot for their business. Backed by Uma, the dedicated team manages the project end-to-end, ultimately reducing time-to-completion and ensuring delivery of a successful outcome for the client.
Uma-powered Managed Services provide a more efficient way to get work done in the age of AI, bringing businesses, expertly skilled freelancers, and technology together more effectively. We will guarantee business-critical work outcomes across a wide range of customer needs as we expand our technology and Uma’s rich insights and work enablement capabilities into many more relevant use cases over time.
Innovative approaches to real-world business outcomes
We know how important it is to help clients when they need top-notch talent to make real-world business results. We have introduced a new method for clients to directly access work-related solutions within the third-party platforms they already use in order to meet our customers where they are. Upwork can now deliver fully managed projects directly to select partners through their own platform experiences.
Innovative providers like Lettuce and Ocoya have partnered with Upwork to offer their customers easy access to tailored projects combining quality work by proven pros and AI-driven managed service support, creating more earning opportunities for freelancers and expanding access to Upwork’s guaranteed work outcomes.
Take Lettuce for example, a financial services platform designed specifically for self-employed individuals. When a customer purchases a fully automated tax and accounting system from Lettuce, they will be offered the option to have a website designed by Upwork at checkout. This is the logical next step when starting a business.
This customer now has the option to connect with Upwork’s experienced freelance logo designers or web developers and let our Managed Services team, aided by Uma, deliver the exact result they require, such as a company logo or website. We’re also making it easier and more efficient for clients to find the exact expertise they need on Upwork by expanding the Upwork Partner Experts program to include Webflow, General Assembly, Bubble, Smartsheet and more. Partners can use the program to give their customers direct access to a reputable group of independent experts who are available whenever they need them. In our Spring 2024 release, a number of partners were announced, including BigCommerce, Constant Contact, and GoDaddy. These new partners join them.
Making hiring the right fit easier
We announced earlier this year that Job Post Generator and a number of other important features on our marketplace are powered by Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI. Today, we are announcing new features that will expand Uma’s capabilities to two new companion experiences that simplify and enhance client-freelancer matching and selection. These features will further integrate Uma into the hiring process. First, clients will be able to ask Uma to find the best freelancers who meet their project requirements the best. Uma will also look at proposals and show freelancers side by side, comparing their verified skills and experience to a job posting. Uma can help draft messages to freelancers who have applied to a job, recommend relevant interview questions, and even suggest next steps in the hiring process.
Freelancers are getting a boost from Uma too, as all talent on Upwork will soon have access to Uma as a powerful work companion that helps them brainstorm, review, analyze, write, code, and do more to work more productively. We’re introducing the ability for Uma to create custom proposal drafts to help freelancers stand out and win more work. Freelancers will receive a suggested proposal based on Upwork data—trillions of tokens of highly relevant interactions and moments that we can feed into our models—because Uma’s custom models are trained on winning proposals. As a result, our algorithms can use real-world experiences to help freelancers put their best foot forward. We have also introduced Upwork Business Plus to further enhance our clients’ hiring confidence and adaptability.
Clients can take advantage of the new membership plan’s additional services, broader range of payment options, and increased insight into Upwork’s top talent for no additional cost. Clients using Upwork Business Plus have instant access to Expert-Vetted talent—the top 1% of pre-screened talent on Upwork—and the Upwork team helps connect the client with shortlisted professionals for their project within two business days. In addition, Upwork Business Plus offers simplified billing and invoicing with net-30 payment terms and personalized client support. To further help clients more easily find and hire quality talent for their projects, we’ve introduced Featured Jobs with prominent placement of job posts that are likely to be seen by more candidates.
We expanded Boosted Profiles, a paid feature that promotes a freelancer’s profile visibility in a targeted manner to increase their chances of being hired, to assist freelancers in surfacing themselves to clients. There are now more places where Boosted Profiles can be found, including Upwork’s primary search and the top of the list of relevant talent that clients see when they post a job. In parallel, we added video introductions, which allow freelancers to record a guided video showcasing their profile and skills, as a new way for them to stand out in their proposals. extending payment and management options for work We are adding features and functionality to make it easier and faster for freelancers to get paid for the high-quality work they produce, find a new job, and manage their Upwork businesses.
On Upwork, freelancers have expressed a desire for greater transparency regarding their Job Success Score (JSS). Our brand-new Job Success Insights provide freelancers with insight into their JSS and assist them in comprehending, constructing, and preserving their reputation. An up-to-date Job Success Score and health range, the JSS requirements and factors that affect the score, and practical suggestions for improving it are included in these insights.