Something strange is happening on Upwork, the freelancer marketplace led by CEO Hayden Brown: AI agents are showing up on the platform and trying to hire humans.

Brown reveals in an interview with Semafor: “We actually see agents hitting our website and trying to hire humans to get work done,” Brown says. The volume is still small, but the phenomenon points to a larger shift that AI systems, when tasked with work they cannot complete independently, are turning to human freelance platforms for help.

So far, the agents aren’t having much luck. Brown says they’re “not very good at it today because they lack a lot of the clarity and comprehension of the work that’s required.” Creating accounts, posting jobs, and executing tasks through the platform has proven to be beyond their current capabilities.

But this early stumbling may be just the beginning. Upwork’s own experiments found that when a human freelancer was brought in to work alongside an AI agent, task completion rates jumped by 70% or more. 

The company is now planning to roll out “human and agent pairs” more broadly. Brown describes this model as a new class of professionals equipped to work with AI while contributing the creativity, judgment, and vision that machines still lack. Such professionals are already commanding a 36% premium on their hourly rates.