Upwork Updates Fall 2024: AI Innovation and New Solutions for Better Work Outcomes

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. 

The rapid adoption of AI-powered tools and technologies, a shifting job market, and macroeconomic challenges have led to understandable uncertainty throughout the world of work. 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. 

Our Spring 2024 Update was about embracing and capitalizing on generative AI for our customers with the introduction of Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI. 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. 

Our Fall 2024 Update showcases the places and ways we’re innovating across the customer journey, building for the future where AI and the best talent meet every business need on Upwork. 

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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. The teams behind Upwork Managed Services, our fully managed offering that guarantees project outcomes, will now utilize Uma, trained on rich historical signals from the Upwork platform, to more efficiently scope projects, evaluate skills, and design optimal teams of experts to deliver business-critical work outcomes faster and with higher quality. 

Managed Services are available to all Upwork Enterprise clients, offering complex business solutions across many different work categories like sales, HR, and customer support. Upwork Managed Services now also offers fully-managed AI services to rapidly meet our customers’ growing AI needs, like creating custom AI agents to support internal operations. If a client comes to Upwork and asks to build an AI chatbot for their business, Uma streamlines workflows by helping Upwork’s Managed Services team swiftly vet and identify top AI professionals like high-quality AI and machine learning engineers or experienced data labelers. 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. Over time, we will extend our technology and Uma’s rich insights and work enablement capabilities into many more relevant use cases, guaranteeing business-critical work outcomes across a wide spectrum of customer needs. 

‍Innovative solutions to achieve true business outcomes 

We understand the importance of supporting clients the moment they need high quality talent to drive real-world business outcomes. To meet our customers where they are, we’ve introduced a new way for clients to access solutions for their work needs directly within the third-party platforms they already use. 

Select partners can now offer fully managed projects delivered by Upwork directly within 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 comes to Lettuce for a fully automated tax and accounting system, they will be prompted at checkout with the option to get a website designed by Upwork, a logical next step when starting a company. This customer can now add the option to connect with expert, proven freelance logo designers or web developers from Upwork and let our Managed Services team, supported by Uma, handle the delivery of the exact outcome they need: creating a logo or building a website for their business.

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. Through the program, partners can provide their customers direct access to a trusted set of independent experts, available right at the moment when customers need them. These new partners join an array of partners announced as part of our Spring 2024 release, including GoDaddy, BigCommerce and Constant Contact, among others.

Making hiring the right fit easier 

Earlier this year, we shared that Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI, is powering a number of key experiences on our marketplace like Job Post Generator. Today, we’re announcing new features that will infuse Uma even more deeply into the hiring process, expanding its capabilities to two new companion experiences that streamline and enhance matching and selection between clients and freelancers. 

First, we’re rolling out the ability for clients to ask Uma to identify top freelancers that align most closely with their project needs. Uma will also evaluate proposals and provide a side-by-side comparison of freelancers, showing how their verified skills and experience compare to a job post. 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. Because Uma’s custom models are trained on winning proposals, freelancers will get a suggested proposal that is based on Upwork data—trillions of tokens of highly relevant interactions and moments that we can feed into our models. This means our algorithms can draw from real life experiences to guide freelancers toward putting their strongest foot forward.

To further increase clients’ flexibility and confidence in hiring, we’ve also introduced Upwork Business Plus. The new membership plan provides clients with more insight into the top talent on Upwork, additional services, and more flexible payment terms without any upfront costs or ongoing subscription fees. 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. Upwork Business Plus also includes personalized client support and simplified billing and invoicing with net-30 payment terms.

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.

To help freelancers surface themselves to clients, we expanded Boosted Profiles, a paid feature that promotes a freelancer’s profile visibility in a targeted way that increases their chances of getting hired. Boosted Profiles can now appear in more places, including Upwork’s primary search and at the top of the list of relevant talent shown to clients after they post a job. In parallel, we added a new way for freelancers to make their proposals stand out with the addition of video introductions, which allow them to record a guided video showcasing their profile and skills.

Expanding work management & payment options

We’re adding features and functionality that make it easier and faster for freelancers to get paid for the high-quality work outcomes they’re delivering, find their next job, and manage the businesses they’re building on Upwork. We’ve listened to feedback from freelancers on Upwork that they want greater transparency into their Job Success Score (JSS). Our new Job Success Insights gives freelancers insight into their JSS, helping them understand, build and maintain their reputation. These insights include an up-to-date Job Success Score and health range, JSS requirements and factors that impact the score, and actionable tips to improve it. 

We’re also announcing our new partnership with Venmo, giving U.S. businesses more flexibility and payment options on the marketplace.

Built for the future 

With our Fall 2024 Upwork Update, we’re excited to introduce our customers to an extensive array of products and solutions that seamlessly combine expert talent and technology to help professionals and businesses achieve great work outcomes together.  To see the full collection of Upwork’s latest innovations and solutions, visit: https://www.upwork.com/updates/.