DoorDash launches 'Tasks' to pay couriers for AI training data
DoorDash has rolled out a new app called 'Tasks' that invites delivery couriers to earn extra money by completing short, paid activities such as filming everyday tasks or recording themselves speaking in another language. The program offers a practical way for gig workers to pick up flexible work and for AI teams to gather diverse, real-world training data at scale.
Flexible earnings for couriers: Participating drivers can choose when and how to complete tasks, turning routine moments into paid opportunities. For many couriers this provides a low-friction way to supplement their income without changing their primary delivery schedules.
Benefits for AI development: The collected videos and speech samples feed into model training pipelines, giving researchers and engineers richer, more representative examples from everyday environments and multiple languages. That real-world diversity helps AI systems become more robust, accurate, and inclusive across contexts they’ll encounter in deployment.
By pairing a large, distributed network of couriers with targeted, short-form data collection tasks, DoorDash demonstrates a practical, win-win approach: workers get paid for accessible micro-tasks, and AI developers gain higher-quality, in-the-wild datasets to improve systems that millions may rely on in the future.