Shift

Shift — Free NYC apartment cleaning in exchange for robotics training data

Shift launched a service offering free apartment cleaning in New York City where vetted human operators clean homes while wearing recording devices to capture training data for robotics AI. Users pay nothing while the company monetizes the anonymized recordings of daily task performance to fund the service. The company plans to expand globally to handymen, repairs, and errands. This represents a novel business model that turns the gig economy into a data collection mechanism for embodied AI development.