Fiverr Goes All-In on AI: Empowering Creators, Not Replacing Them, with Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Micha Kaufman, founder and CEO of international freelancing marketplace Fiverr. He's recently launched an interesting new suite of AI products called Fiverr Go, staked out one of the most notable values-based positions for how his company intends to use AI to empower human creators, and published what began as an internal company memo meant to wake team members up to the quote unpleasant truth that AI is coming for your jobs, adding also quote, heck, it's coming for my job too. As fast-improving AI capabilities and even faster-falling prices enable startups to disrupt all sorts of markets everywhere all at once, Fiverr Go stands out as an attempt not to maximize the value to price ratio for customers, but to empower the freelancers that have powered the Fiverr Marketplace over the last 15 years. Today, that means providing freelancers, who, interestingly, Micha Notes are very often eager early adopters of AI tools, and actually in some ways much better prepared for the AI era than most salaried employees, with custom AI assistants that can help them engage and serve more customers more efficiently, and also personalized image generation and text-to-speech models that are meant to ensure that the platform's many graphic designers and voiceover artists maintain control over and can continue to monetize their own distinctive styles and sounds. For a sense of just how different Fiverr's positioning is from most of what we hear in the AI space today, listen to a bit of the keynote presentation where Micha announced Fiverr Go.

**Micha Kaufman** (1:35)
If everything you create, the moment you create has zero value because AI sucks it and churns out generative stuff based on you without giving you credit, without giving you the opportunity to gain from it, then my fear is that people's motivation to create is going to drop to zero because there's no value. So why would we create? I think that a future that doesn't motivate people to create could be a very, very dark future. What the Fiverr team has built is truly remarkable. Very few teams in the world can build this. But this doesn't mean we think it's perfect. It will be perfect when you say so. And our commitment is to continue trying until we get it right.
We always thought of Fiverr as a movement. And every movement needs a reason to exist. Ours is you guys. So we know that you're going to love them because we're not going to rest until you do. The idea of the creation model is not to replace you. It's not taking your voice. It's not taking your art. It's not taking your content. It is providing samples for customers to make them feel more confidence to make a deal with you. It's a conversion tool. You guys are going to make more money, not necessarily by working harder, but smarter.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:27)
Now this is obviously an attempt to position Fiverr for success in the AI age. But as you'll hear in this conversation, it does run much deeper than that. Micha is trying to find a way to continue to motivate individual humans to contribute to the collective project of knowledge and culture building that have advanced to the human condition so spectacularly over the last 500 years. That motivation and sense of contribution, if I understand him correctly, he sees as an intrinsic good that can't fully be substituted for with AI-provided abundance. Obviously it remains to be seen how well this human creator-centric model will fare in the broader marketplace, but I really do admire the fact that their approach is motivated by an aspirational sense of how the AI future ideally should be, and not simply by a values-free economic analysis of what is supposedly inevitable. He's humble enough to admit that he doesn't know if the current approach will work, but as all leaders must in the AI era, he promises to keep iterating as fast as possible in pursuit of an AI-human hybrid model that's both successful and sustainable. At a minimum, Micha and team have done something many might have thought impossible. They've launched a suite of AI products that freelance creators don't hate. And with some luck, their example might inspire other platform owners to attempt to defy market pressures and concretize their own dreams for a positive AI future. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd share it with friends or write a review. And please don't hesitate to reach out with your feedback. I expect major disruption and intensifying competition, not just in the freelance labor market, but in many parts of the economy and even at the level of international relations. My goal is to help people understand AI on its own terms, from as many different perspectives as possible, so we can avoid the dystopian scenarios of human disempowerment and instead, with AI's help, live the lives we've always dreamed of. Part of the way I'm doing that is by speaking at more AI events. Coming up, I'll be at Imagine AI Live in Las Vegas May 28th through 30th, the Adapta Summit in São Paulo, Brazil August 12th and 13th, and the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit in Las Vegas September 23rd through 25th. If you'll be at any of those events, if you're interested in AI strategy, automation, or application development consulting for your organization, or if you've just got suggestions for how the Cognitive Revolution can be a more positive force in the AI discourse, you are always welcome to reach us via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. For now, I hope you enjoyed this conversation about the future of work and the challenge of building an AI platform on a foundation of core human values, with Micha Kaufman, founder and CEO of Fiverr. At a minimum, Micha and team have done something many might have thought impossible. They've launched a suite of AI products that freelance creators don't hate. And with some luck, their example might inspire other platform owners to attempt to defy market pressures and concretize their own dreams for a positive AI future.