Forbes Daily Briefing

The Forbes Daily Briefing shares the best of Forbes reporting on wealth, business, entrepreneurship, leadership and more. Tune in every day, seven days a week, to hear a new story. The Daily Briefing is edited, produced and hosted by Kieran Meadows.

  1. 4 hr ago

    Why This Startup Is Strapping Cameras To Housekeepers’ Heads In India

    On a Tuesday evening in early July, Anushka Ahuja, a dentist in Gurgaon, India, opens the door for the house help she booked ten minutes ago on Pronto, an app that provides instant professional cleaning services like sweeping, mopping and laundry across 11 cities in India. A woman clad in a crisp uniform greets her with a polite smile, then asks: Can she strap a small camera onto her head to record her work?  Ahuja isn’t surprised to see the camera. In fact, she paid an extra nine rupees (about nine cents) so her cleaner would record everything from her elbows to her fingertips. Now she’ll receive a video recording a few hours later, giving her peace of mind that her house was cleaned properly and nothing was stolen or broken in her absence.  Despite disclosures in the consent form she signed, Ahuja initially didn’t realize that there’s another purpose to the camera footage: AI training data. After a cleaning session, the video is stripped of personally identifiable information like personal documents and people’s faces and then sold to American AI companies.  Bangalore-based Pronto launched the video recording service, called Pronto Verified, in May, stirring widespread backlash in India and government scrutiny over privacy concerns. Customers consent to the recording and workers are paid double for Pronto Verified bookings, CEO Anjali Sardana says.  “Trillions of dollars are going into AI capex every year. All the money in the world is getting invested in AI, but your blue-collar worker in India is not capturing any of that,” Sardana, 24, tells Forbes. “And there is an opportunity to actually redistribute that capital.” By Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Why This Startup Is Strapping Cameras To Housekeepers’ Heads In India
  2. 6 days ago

    Axon Says AI Police Reports Save Time. Public Records Show They Get Facts Wrong

    In Lafayette, Indiana, a small city with a population of just over 70,000, the local police force decided to try out a new AI tool sold by law enforcement tech giant Axon, the company with a $35 billion market cap best known for making the Taser. Called Form One, it promised to save officers time by listening to the audio from their body cameras, then filling out the administrative details of a police report: officers and citizens’ names, ID documentation, license plates and other vehicle information. For Lafayette’s captains who’d worked closely with Axon on previous AI projects, it seemed like a no-brainer. But after seven months of testing the technology, many of Lafayette’s officers found the tool was wasting time, not saving it. “I know it doesn't save me time and I know it has inaccuracies that I will have to edit,” wrote one officer in a cache of emails obtained by Forbes via public records request. Form One struggled to record the right names or car plates, even when they were clearly stated in the camera footage, according to other emails. One cop said a simple form that used to take 30 seconds to fill out manually now takes three minutes with Form One because there are so many errors. “Form One dramatically increases the time it takes to finish reports,” he wrote to a colleague. By Thomas Brewster Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The Forbes Daily Briefing shares the best of Forbes reporting on wealth, business, entrepreneurship, leadership and more. Tune in every day, seven days a week, to hear a new story. The Daily Briefing is edited, produced and hosted by Kieran Meadows.

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