DoorDash Wants to Pay Ottawa Couriers to Train Its AI
Ottawa's gig economy workers may have a new side hustle on the horizon, as DoorDash has quietly launched a new app called Tasks, a platform that pays its delivery couriers to submit videos for AI training purposes.
The app, revealed this week, allows couriers already active on the DoorDash network to earn money by completing small data-collection jobs. These include filming themselves performing everyday tasks or recording themselves speaking in languages other than English. The data is then used to train artificial intelligence models, feeding the growing industry demand for diverse, real-world video and audio data.
What Is AI Training Data, and Why Does It Pay?
AI systems, particularly those involving computer vision and language understanding, require enormous quantities of labelled human-generated data to learn from. Companies building these models often pay third parties to collect it, and increasingly, gig platforms are stepping in as the middlemen.
For DoorDash, leveraging its existing courier base is a natural extension. The couriers already carry smartphones, are comfortable with app-based task completion, and represent a geographically and linguistically diverse workforce, exactly what AI developers are looking for.
For individual workers, it's a flexible way to earn outside of traditional delivery windows, without needing a car or insulated bag.
What This Means for Ottawa's Gig Workers
Ottawa has a robust and growing gig economy, with thousands of residents working as delivery couriers through platforms like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Skip the Dishes. For many, the work is unpredictable, income fluctuates with weather, time of day, and surge periods.
A supplementary income stream like Tasks could offer real value, particularly during slow delivery hours or harsh winter stretches when orders drop off. Ottawa winters are no joke, and anything that lets couriers earn from a warm apartment rather than biking through a -20°C windchill on Bank Street is bound to get attention.
That said, gig workers and labour advocates may want to scrutinize the fine print. Questions around how the data is used, what rates of pay look like, and whether Tasks creates new dependencies between couriers and the platform are worth watching closely.
The Bigger Picture: Gig Platforms and the AI Economy
DoorDash isn't alone in exploring this space. Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Scale AI have long paid workers to complete data annotation jobs. What's new here is that an established consumer delivery brand is bundling AI data work directly into its courier ecosystem.
It signals a broader shift: as AI development accelerates, the demand for human-generated training data is becoming a jobs market in itself, and gig platforms are uniquely positioned to supply it.
For Ottawa workers already navigating the unpredictability of platform-based work, Tasks is worth keeping an eye on when it becomes more widely available.
Source: TechCrunch
