Partnering with OpenAI to Help Independent Talent on Upwork Thrive with AI

At Upwork, the world’s human and AI-powered work marketplace, our purpose is simple but ambitious: to create opportunity in every era of work. Each day, millions of independent professionals around the world come to Upwork to build careers and businesses, learn new skills, and access opportunities that transcend geography, background, or circumstance. Our global talent community is the heartbeat of our marketplace.

Today, we’re announcing a partnership with OpenAI to offer AI training, certifications, and upskilling to global independent professionals on Upwork—the first of many upcoming partnerships that deepen our commitment to helping talent succeed in this new era. We believe AI can unlock entirely new possibilities for talent, helping them learn faster, work smarter, and turn ideas into impact, so long as people remain at the center.

A future of work already taking shape

Our proprietary Upwork data and research reinforce just how transformative the human+AI era of work can be and how AI is already improving prospects for talent as companies seek professionals with the latest AI skills across fields and functions:

• Independent professionals working on AI-related projects earn more than a 40% premium per hour compared to non-AI-related work, signaling how AI skills are rapidly becoming some of the most economically valuable in the global labor market.¹
• 85% of businesses say AI literacy skills are becoming more important in their organization.²
• 77% of hiring decision makers indicate that their organization’s adoption of AI technology will likely increase their demand for fractional or flexible labor.³

AI skills are also becoming more critical as AI agents make a significant entrance into work—an emerging trend Upwork is at the forefront of studying. In our recently launched Human+Agent Productivity Index (HAPI), we showed that the future of work will consist of AI and humans in deep collaboration, with agents providing speed and scale and humans providing creativity, judgment, and oversight, building trust and delivering better results together.

Every day on Upwork, we see that when people can access AI tools and develop relevant AI-enabled skills and collaborative cadences, opportunities expand. Productivity rises. Earnings potential increases. And entirely new categories of work emerge. In fact, over the last year, AI-related work has grown more than 50% on our platform, driven by new demand in areas like generative design, agent orchestration, and AI model implementation. That directly translates to more opportunities for AI-equipped talent.

Preparing talent for an AI-driven economy

An overwhelming 93% of independent professionals are interested in using AI to improve their work output. To do so, 57% are actively upskilling in AI, and an additional 22% plan to start soon.⁴

We’re supporting those efforts by investing to give every professional on Upwork the opportunity to build the skills that matter most in an AI-driven economy. While we already have 250,000 AI experts available for hire on our platform, we aim to exponentially grow that cohort by helping more professionals advance their AI proficiency so they can work on projects that command a premium.

That’s why we’re excited to partner with OpenAI to expand economic opportunity through practical AI skills training and certifications, as part of their upcoming OpenAI Jobs Platform. Together, we’re introducing training and certification pathways that help talent develop AI abilities—and then immediately put those skills to work for businesses of all sizes on Upwork. This starts with giving professionals access to OpenAI’s AI Foundations course to help them learn core, practical AI skills, directly inside ChatGPT. Those who complete the course will earn a certification for job-ready AI skills. It’s a powerful way to connect learning, skills development, and certifications directly to economic opportunity, and we’ll partner on additional training and certifications from here.

Building an ecosystem to accelerate our purpose

This is just the beginning. In the months ahead, we’ll deepen our relationship with OpenAI and expand our partnership ecosystem to bring our global community even more training, tools, and avenues for skills advancement. We’re also building new relationships to support a broader set of businesses looking to the Upwork platform to hire these talented professionals across more than 365 different AI skills. Together with our partners and customers, we’ll create even more opportunities through every era of work.

¹Upwork platform data (Q1 2025)

‍²November Business Pulse Survey from the Upwork Research Institute (November 2025)

³Upwork B2B Workforce Marketplace Survey, based on responses from U.S.-based hiring decision-makers (October 2025)

⁴Upwork Talent State of AI Survey (November 2025)

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