Homeowners in Minneapolis, Chicago and Miami can now get a plumber, electrician or HVAC technician to their house without paying for it, on one condition.
The technician wears a camera. HUMXN, a Minneapolis AI data company, announced Oct. 6 that it will pay for select plumbing, electrical, HVAC, air duct cleaning and carpet cleaning jobs through partner home service companies.
In exchange, technicians do the work while wearing capture gear that records it from their point of view, and HUMXN turns the footage into training datasets for AI and robotics companies.
Large language models learned to write by scraping the internet, but there’s no internet-scale archive of hands fixing a leaking valve or rewiring a breaker box. “There are millions of skilled workers performing incredibly complex tasks every day, but very little of that expertise exists in a format that AI systems can learn from,” HUMXN founder Thomas Unise said in the announcement.
HUMXN is also shopping for more. A week after launching the home service program, the company announced plans to buy $50 million worth of data from skilled trades, agriculture and manufacturing businesses, including first-person wearable camera footage, which it values at about $20 per approved hour, according to coverage of the Oct. 13 release.
The company is part of a fast-growing market for what the industry calls physical AI. NPR reported Oct. 15 that thousands of people in India are being paid around $120 a month to film themselves folding laundry and chopping vegetables with phones strapped to their heads, footage that teaches humanoid robots how people use their hands. HUMXN is betting that skilled trades are the more valuable version of that data, since a service call captures real problems that a staged demo can’t.
HUMXN’s announcement doesn’t explain what homeowners agree to when a camera comes into their home, how that footage is protected, or what technicians are paid for being recorded beyond their companies being paid for the job.
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The company says privacy is central to its model but hasn’t published the details.
The most uncomfortable part is who’s teaching whom. Each free repair produces footage of a skilled worker doing exactly what robotics companies hope their machines will one day do without them.
Plumbers and electricians have been among the most automation-proof jobs in the economy, and that’s precisely why their hands have become valuable data.
