PredictHQ, the demand intelligence company, announced a partnership with leading gig economy empowerment platform Stoovo. Stoovo is an AI-driven platform that helps independent workers strategically choose the right short-term work opportunities near them. The company will integrate PredictHQ's demand intelligence with their advanced AI platform to alert gig economy workers to where demand will surge in advance, allowing them to review and accept the most lucrative gigs in the closest geographic proximity. PredictHQ's demand intelligence is already used by leading rideshare companies including Uber and delivery networks including GoPuff. Its enriched data on events that drive demand for independent workers is already enabling better demand forecasting and planning across the on-demand industry.

Artificial Intelligence, or'AI' is the buzzword of the year. What does AI mean to us Independent Workers? Are we going to be replaced by an algorithm? I've been a computer programmer for almost fifty years now and all through my career I was told that a computer was going to replace me. No, it was a computer, I remember.

I have been reading and researching what has been written about the future of work and how we can prepare and be ready to adapt. I am going to use a gross over-simplified definition of business as demand meeting supply to explain what I have learned. In this simple definition, I look back at talent shortages or surpluses I have lived through and see them all as moderate adjustments of talent demand and supply. For example, we needed fewer transcriptionists and couldn't hire enough customer service representatives. What is different in this latest shift is that the scale of innovation is spectacular in terms of what technology can perform, and the pace of this shift is so much faster than what we have experienced before.

Data collection, and their analysis with the help of Artificial Intelligence are making work more productive and efficient each day. But soon AI will become more autonomous and more demanding. Not a day passes without progress in the artificial intelligence sector as it slowly becomes mainstream. There are those who are alarmed the whole thing will bring about unemployment for all. One French series, Terpalium, describes a dystopian future where AI has led to a situation in which an elite few enjoy all the joys of modern life while most of the population is in a vegetative state of misery and laziness.