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Upwork (Nasdaq: UPWK), the world’s work marketplace that connects businesses with independent talent across the globe, today released a collection of new products, features and partnerships to transform how businesses and professionals find each other, hire, collaborate, manage and pay for work, as part of Upwork Updates: Fall 2024, Upwork’s semi-annual product release.
Delivering Work Outcomes with Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI
Upwork Updates: Fall 2024 is headlined by the expansion of Uma’s capabilities across the Upwork experience, including new avenues for businesses to find and hire the right highly skilled professionals and for freelancers to get matched with projects that best fit their expertise.
Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI, will power two new experiences that streamline and enhance the matching and hiring process between clients and freelancers:
- For freelancers, Upwork is rolling out the ability for Uma to create tailored proposal drafts, leveraging custom AI models trained on winning proposals, to help them stand out and win more work.
- For businesses, Uma will identify top freelancers that align most closely with project needs and evaluate proposals, providing a side-by-side comparison that shows how professionals’ skills and experience fit the job post.
“Today, businesses come to Upwork for on-demand hiring. Tomorrow, our goal is to make Upwork the premier destination for on-demand work outcomes. In this era, there’s a smarter way to work, combining high-quality talent, best-in-class tools and cutting-edge AI,” said Hayden Brown, president and CEO of Upwork. “Our Upwork Updates Fall release is a significant step towards that vision. Upwork has always given businesses access to the world’s best expert talent, but Uma is a pivotal unlock in accelerating delivery of better work outcomes for a wide range of customer needs.”
Uma is also beginning to power the end-to-end delivery of work outcomes for clients. Managed Services, Upwork’s fully managed offering that guarantees project outcomes, will now utilize Uma’s proprietary AI to more efficiently scope projects, evaluate skills, and design optimal teams of experts to deliver business-critical work outcomes, like building a website or generating qualified sales leads, faster and with higher quality.
Managed Services are available to all businesses via Upwork Enterprise and now offer fully-managed AI services to rapidly meet Upwork clients’ growing AI needs, such as creating custom AI agents. Armed internally with the power of Uma, the dedicated Upwork Managed Services team manages these projects end-to-end, ultimately reducing time-to-completion and ensuring delivery of a successful outcome for the client.
Also announced today, third-party technology providers can now offer fully-managed projects delivered by Upwork embedded directly within their own platform experiences. Innovative providers like Lettuce and Ocoya are now partnering with Upwork to offer their customers easy access to tailored, guaranteed outcomes combining quality work by proven experts and AI-driven managed service support.
Further Enhancements to Find and Hire the Right High-Quality Talent
To increase clients’ flexibility and confidence in finding and hiring high-quality freelancers, Upwork introduced Upwork Business Plus. Clients using the Upwork Business Plus plan have instant access to Expert-Vetted talent—the top 1% of pre-screened talent on Upwork—and the Upwork team helps connect the client with shortlisted professionals for their project within two business days. Upwork Business Plus also includes personalized support and simplified billing and invoicing with net-30 payment terms, all without any upfront costs or ongoing subscription fees.
To help connect clients with the right specialized freelancers, Upwork also added Webflow, General Assembly, Bubble, Smartsheet, and more to its Partner Experts program, providing clients access to curated collections of trusted, proven experts on Upwork deeply experienced in working with the partners’ specific technologies.
To help clients more easily find and hire quality talent for their projects, Upwork introduced Featured Jobs with prominent placement of job posts that are likely to be seen by more candidates.
To help freelancers surface themselves to clients, Upwork expanded Boosted Profiles, a paid feature that promotes a freelancer’s profile visibility in a targeted way that increases their chances of getting hired. Boosted Profiles can now appear in more places, including Upwork’s primary search and at the top of the list of relevant talent shown to clients after they post a job. In parallel, Upwork added a new way for freelancers to make their proposals stand out with video introductions, which allow them to record a guided video showcasing their profile and skills.
“Our Talent Marketplace thrives by connecting businesses with the ideal expert freelancer for their project,” said Dave Bottoms, general manager and VP of product for the Upwork Marketplace. “Today’s announcements introduce several innovative ways we’re improving that matching, connection and collaboration—whether through increased access to Upwork’s Expert-Vetted talent or Uma’s AI-powered capabilities—and giving our customers the confidence they need to consistently achieve high-quality work outcomes.”
Expanding Work Management and Payment
Additional Upwork Updates features and functionality make it easier and faster for freelancers to get paid for the high-quality work outcomes they’re delivering, find their next project, and manage the businesses they’re building on Upwork.
Upwork’s Job Success Insights gives freelancers insight into their Job Success Score (JSS), helping them understand, build, and maintain their reputation on the platform. Job Success Insights includes an up-to-date Job Success Score and health range, JSS requirements and factors that impact the score, as well as actionable tips to improve JSS.
Upwork has also partnered with Venmo, giving U.S. clients more flexibility and payment options on the marketplace, making it even easier, faster and more efficient for them to pay talent for their work.
For the full list of today’s announcements and to experience the innovations highlighted as part of Upwork Updates: Fall 2024, please visit: www.upwork.com/updates/fall-2024.
