AI is becoming the gateway to opportunity, but it’s being built in too few languages.
These aren’t small or endangered languages - many are spoken by tens of millions of people, yet remain digitally invisible.
Karya turns this AI’s demand for data into dignified digital work by closing the gap between who AI serves and who gets to build it.
Better AI Better Livelihoods
Growing demand for dignified,
fairly paid digital work
Karya workers upskill into
higher-value AI tasks
Karya workers build datasets in
underrepresented languages
Better models able to serve
more communities
Models improve across
these languages
Skills, confidence and
incomes grow
Better AI Better Livelihoods
Karya workers build datasets in underrepresented languages
Models improve across these languages
Karya workers upskill into higher-value AI tasks
Skills, confidence and incomes grow
Better models able to serve more communities
Growing demand for dignified, fairly paid digital work
Our supporters
Impact so far
In the last financial year, average income gain rose from roughly 5% to 25.8%. For women workers, the figure was 35%.
$ 4.02M
In total wages
195k+
Total workforce
55%
Workers are women
28
All states in India covered
7
Countries our platform has been deployed in
75+
Languages in which we have built datasets
25.8%
Average increase in worker annual income, FY2025–26
3.6x
Average annual income gain among our top-earners
Read Karya’s impact reports
Meet the Karya worker
The typical Karya worker is a woman in her early twenties, educated through Class 11–12 or holding a bachelor's degree, and most often a Hindi speaker. She typically has no formal employment. Nearly a third of workers are enrolled in at least one government welfare scheme, most commonly a BPL card, Ayushman Bharat, or MGNREGA.
What sustained access makes possible?
The difference between our top 1% earners and the rest of Karya workers is not education but continuous access to work and progression into higher-value tasks.
72%
workers had no individual income of their own prior to Karya
2X
higher median payouts to women than to men.
38%
of workforce participate in at least one government welfare scheme
$866
annual income gain of top earners in financial year 25-26.
3.6x
average annual income gain for top earner in financial year 25-26.
57%
of top earners are women
“The best part was buying a new phone with my own earnings. It helped me work better on Karya and made studying easier too.”
Darshan Sachin Tambat from Sangli, Maharashtra,$545 earned so far
As a college student pursuing a B.Sc. in Chemistry, Darshan Sachin Tambat was looking for a way to earn without compromising his studies. He decided to give Karya a try. Two years later, it remains an important source of financial independence during his studies.
Through AI evaluation projects, he learned to research unfamiliar topics, compare information from multiple sources, and make evidence-based decisions. He particularly enjoyed evaluating chatbot responses, describing the work as an opportunity to learn while he earned.
The income made a practical difference in his day-to-day life. Rather than relying on his parents, he used his earnings to pay his semester fees, cover travel and college expenses, and buy a new phone with his own savings. Upgrading from a 2 GB to an 8 GB device not only made Karya tasks smoother, but also allowed him to download study materials and prepare more effectively for his exams.
“Now I don't have to ask for money. If I decide to do something for my daughter or my family, I simply say, I'm doing this.”
An interview with Pooja Rajat Vanjire from Kolhapur, Maharashtra,$702 earned so far
A pharmacist from Kolhapur raising a young daughter, Pooja Rajat Vanjire was looking for flexible work that could fit around family life. What began as a single project soon became something much bigger for both her and her family. Today, Pooja and her husband often spend their evenings working on Karya projects after putting their daughter to bed, encouraging each other to meet project targets.
Karya became especially meaningful during a difficult period when her husband lost his job.
The income she earned helped support the family until he found work again. But for Pooja, the greatest change has been the confidence that came with earning an income of her own.
Today, she contributes to family decisions with greater confidence, supports her daughter's needs without hesitation, and no longer has to rely on others for everyday expenses.
“Karya gave me the opportunity to do meaningful work while staying connected to the world beyond my home.”
Chaula Solanki from Mumbai, Maharashtra,$602 earned so far
When Chaula Solanki moved from Gujarat to Mumbai after marriage, life gradually became centred around raising a family. An electrical engineer with a postgraduate diploma in business management, she stepped away from her professional career to care for her children.
She remained active through volunteer work, but she found herself missing both the intellectual challenge of work and the opportunity to stay connected with the world beyond her home. Living in Mumbai also meant that Gujarati, the language she had grown up loving, became something she spoke mostly within her family.
When she began working on image annotation, transcription, and language projects at Karya, every task became an opportunity to learn something new. More unexpectedly, the work rekindled her relationship with Gujarati. Through reading, listening, speaking, and reviewing the language every day, she rediscovered something she had not realised she had missed.
Today, Chaula hopes to continue contributing as a worker and eventually help design projects that make digital work even more meaningful for others.
Evidence of impact
Karya's impact on its workforce is measured by independent researchers - not just by us.
RCT with J-PAL
Designing for women's realities made them 3× more likely to take up formal jobs.
1670
Households in West Bengal
15% to 48%
Home-based work lifted job take-up
Harvard persuasion study
Harvard-led RCT studying AI's impact on gender attitudes.
Coming soon
Karya Institute
Realising the potential of digital work
Launched in January 2025, the Karya Institute serves as our internal think tank, building an open, replicable blueprint for ethical digital work via open research, benchmarks, playbooks, and policy tools and sharing it as Digital Public Goods. The blueprint starts from the realities that keep people out of conventional work. India's Time Use Survey finds over 204 million women who don't leave home on a given day — held there by three overlapping constraints:
Time poverty
Indian women spend 9.8× more time on unpaid domestic and care work than men (NITI Aayog), leaving little room for paid work.
Limited mobility
In rural areas, over half of women in non-farm work never travel outside the home; another 18% stay within 1.5 km of it.
Social restrictions
Beyond weak transport links, norms set by husbands and in-laws often decide whether a woman can work at all.
Digital work fits around these constraints instead of fighting them. Karya is building three things to turn it into dignified, lasting livelihoods:
Karya Learn
Karya's in-house Learning Hub creates pathways from entry-level data work to higher-value AI work. Through mobile-first training, workers build digital skills and life skills such as confidence, communication, financial awareness, workplace readiness, and problem-solving. These skills help workers overcome digital literacy barriers and progress into more complex, better-paying opportunities.
Code of Conduct
Karya worked with Aapti Institute to develop a set of standards for improving data worker safety and well-being through a Code of Conduct. These standards define the minimum requirements needed to make data work a more stable, reliable, and ethical form of labour, moving from addressing immediate precarities to enabling long-term worker growth.
Learn moreSamudaye
An open, shared infrastructure for ethical digital work at national scale, Samudaye is a verified worker registry allowing AI-enabled job matching for low-income communities across India.
Learn morePartner with us
The future of AI is being built now.
We invite funders to partner with us now - while the systems, standards, and opportunities of the AI economy are still being formed.