Is Generative AI Opening the Era of The Reverse Mechanical Turk?

The Mechanical Turk is a time-honored startup development strategy: pretend your product is ready while you are still building it, and perform the missing tasks manually behind the scenes.

This allows founders to validate ideas quickly, bootstrap with minimal resources, and gather real-world feedback. Famous Mechanical Turk examples include:

• Nick Swinmurn, the founder of Zappos, initially posting online shoe pictures from local stores, and manually buying and shipping the shoes to fulfill orders.
• Airbnb founders manually matching hosts with guests and even visiting host homes to take photos and write descriptions.
• The Stripe guys manually processing payments and integrating systems for their early customers, pretending they had a fully functional platform.

Quite striking!

AI and the reversal of the Mechanical Turk

But continuing AI advances may well turn the Mechanical Turk strategy on its head.

Instead of pretending a product is ready and manually performing the tasks, startups could do the opposite: sell and pretend they are delivering a personalized service, while using AI agents to perform an increasing share of the tasks automatically.

I don’t even think that startups should hide this strategy from clients. Instead, they can be open about how AI agents are continually learning from all sorts of service interactions: emails, meeting transcripts, project documentation…

This transparency can actually strengthen the relationship between startups and clients, as clients benefit from continuous improvements and a more efficient "service", and startups collect valuable data to enhance their product.

Startups could also integrate these dynamics into their pricing model, with costs decreasing as automation increases. Here too the Reverse Mechanical Turk would be mutually beneficial: clients would see improved efficiency and lower fees, while startups would capture value from increasing margins.

Particularly relevant for B2B in Europe

In Europe, large corporations are often hesitant to adopt innovative products. As a young company with few references, it can be easier to sell services to them, for three main reasons:

• European managers are often more cautious about the political and technological risks associated with new products. The European Innovation Scoreboard, published annually by the European Commission, consistently shows that European countries, particularly in traditional industries, are slower to adopt cutting-edge technologies.
• Services can be scaled up or down without significant internal approvals. Forrester has found that European companies prefer buying services due to perceived higher scalability.
• The barriers to entry are lower, and the decision-making process is faster. That is a big plus with European B2B companies that, as measured by Deloitte, have longer and more complex procurement processes compared to their US peers.

A real opportunity for startups

The Reverse Mechanical Turk approach could thus be particularly valuable for startups trying to bootstrap. It allows them to generate revenue and build credibility, all while minimizing the perceived risk for their clients. The startups can also scale faster, because AI doesn’t require the same human resources that manual services do.

Once startups have established client relationships and trust, they can gradually and openly transition from a service model to a product offering. By that time, the startups will have references, a refined product, and a clear understanding of product-market fit — all achieved while their AI-powered "service" helped solve real problems for real clients.

As AI continues to evolve, this strategy could change how startups engage with large corporations.

How do you see AI transforming the traditional product-service dynamic?