Mon, 13 Oct 2025

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 Why AI is being trained in rural India

Smaller Indian towns are becoming centres for training and correcting artificial intelligence models.
The company was founded in 2005 with the mission of bringing high-quality careers closer to home and proving that quality work can be delivered from anywhere. Desicrew's chief executive Mannivannan J K says "we realised that instead of forcing people to migrate to cities in search of jobs, we could bring jobs to where people already live." The company does various outsourced work including software testing for start-up firms and moderating content. At the moment 30-40% of its work is AI related, but this will grow to 75-100% soon. Mannivannan J K explains that transcription - turning audio to text - is crucial for training machines to understand variations in how people speak, which is necessary for AI to comprehend and respond across languages, dialects, and contexts. Around 70% of Desicrew's workforce are women: "For many, this is their first salaried job, and the impact on their families is transformative – from financial security to education for their children," says Mr J K. NextWealth, which employs 5,000 staff in 11 offices across India, also moved into AI five years ago. Co-founder Mythily Ramesh believes that India's small towns can be a backbone of the workforce as AI and GenAI create close to 100 million jobs in training, validation, and real-time handling. NextWealth started with outsourced work from big companies' back offices but shifted its focus to artificial intelligence five years ago. "Every AI model needs vast amounts of human-labelled data," says Ms Ramesh. The company gets 70% of its work from the US. In India's cloud farming industry, small-town workers are increasingly involved in training and validating AI models. Mythily Ramesh predicts that NextWealth will continue to grow as a major player in this field.
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