Artificial intelligence crowdsourcing provider Appen spent this week trying to answer the question that has wiped as much as $4 billion from its market valuation since August: Can the company thrive despite its reliance on US tech giants like Amazon and Facebook which account for the lions share of its revenue?
In a market update on Wednesday, Appen detailed its plans to restructure and become more customer and product-focused by actually using artificial intelligence itself. Where as it previously just provided human labour, Appen will provide a full service AI platform to help customers like Amazon identify things like different hat choices for its customers. To put it simply, we are accelerating our transformation into an AI-powered provider of AI data and solutions, said Appen chief executive Mark Brayan.
Appens overreliance on the US tech giants has triggered a $4 billion share rout since August. Credit:AP
On Thursday, the company provided details of its new products that will build new business outside of the tech giants like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon which have provided up to 80 per cent of its revenue.
This reliance triggered a share rout starting last December when Appen issued an earnings downgrade. It blamed the tech giants shift in focus away from big projects that require Appens expertise, but claimed this was a temporary blip.
This blip came despite Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all beating consensus revenue estimates in their most recent quarterly reports.
Most of Appens work relates to the tech giants advertising businesses, with its workers teaching computers to recognise basic images and speech, laying down the basic groundwork for the development of Artificial Intelligence solutions.
Appens products came into focus last week when it was forced to apologise after being hit by claims of racism in its recruitment processes after it asked job candidates about their skin colour. A spokeswoman said there was no intended racism in Appens hiring processes, practices or policies.
At the technology briefing on Thursday, Appen executives faced the big question: do the tech giants still need Appen?
We see a departure from people building their own platforms to wanting to work with a specialist provider, was the reassuring answer from Mr Brayan.
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