Rafael Enrique | Light Rocket | Getty Images
Appen is a troubled artificial intelligence company that has helped tech giants train artificial intelligence models, including Microsoft, Nvidia and googlelost its top executive responsible for revenue and marketing.
The Australian company’s chief revenue officer, Andrew Ettinger, and marketing chief, Alicia Hale, resigned last week, according to an internal memo seen by CNBC. Both senior executives joined the company last year.
“Strengthening our sales and marketing functions remains a top priority for the company,” CEO Ryan Kolln wrote in a memo shared with CNBC. “Our strategy to grow revenue from existing and new customers has not changed.”
Departure times are as follows letterIn January it announced it was severing all contractual ties with Appen, which helped train Google’s chatbots and other artificial intelligence products. The decision comes two weeks after Appen chief executive Armughan Ahmad resigned after just 12 months in the job.
While generative AI is booming, Appen, once an industry darling, has been losing business as tech companies spend billions training their own large language models (LLMs) or building on leading AI platforms . They are all pursuing a market that is expected to emerge Up to $1 trillion Income over ten years.
Appen’s revenue fell 30% in 2023 despite a once-enviable client list and nearly 30 years of history down 13% a year ago. The company attributed part of the decline to “challenging external operating and macro conditions.”
Former employees told CNBC last year that the company’s efforts to move toward generative artificial intelligence reflected years of weak quality control and a disjointed organizational structure.
The latest memo also mentions that the company’s vice president of sales and global solutions will now report directly to Cohen, who wrote that the company is “targeting customers who currently spend money on data services.”
Five customers – Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google and Amazon – have historically accounted for 80% of Appen’s revenue, and the company uses its platform of approximately 1 million freelance workers in more than 170 countries to train some of the world’s leading artificial intelligence systems. .
Alphabet notified Appen in January that it was terminating the agreement, effective March 19, following a “strategic review process,” according to a report. Archive From Appen. The company said at the time that it had “no prior knowledge of Google’s decision to terminate the contract.” In 2023, Appen had full-year sales of $273 million, with revenue from its partnership with Alphabet totaling $82.8 million, according to a January filing.
In August 2020, Appen’s share price peaked at A$42.44 (US$27.08) on the ASX, giving it a market capitalization of US$4.3 billion. The company has since lost 99% of its value.
According to public information and information, Appen’s past work for technology companies includes assessing the relevance of search results, helping artificial intelligence assistants understand requests in different accents, using artificial intelligence to classify e-commerce images, and building solutions for electric vehicle charging stations. Map location.
Today, the LL.M.s behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are scouring the digital world to provide complex answers and advanced images in response to simple text queries. Companies spend much more on Nvidia processors and much less on external AI training from companies like Appen.
科恩在備忘錄中寫道：“我高度重視支持我們的銷售團隊，以便他們盡可能高效。” “為了實現這一目標，我們需要為他們提供使澳鵬與我們的競爭對手區分開來的內容和information.”
Appen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
watch: “We are still ten years away from solving the problem of artificial intelligence”
About The Author
