Taobao’s AI-enabled deliveries help close pay gap for deaf couriers
Semafor · Zoë Schiffer ·
A simple AI tool reduced the discrepancy in hourly pay by roughly a third.
China’s largest online delivery service, Taobao Instant Commerce, handles 75 million orders a day. But to coordinate a final handoff, couriers often call customers on the phone to meet up — a hurdle for workers who are deaf or hard of hearing.
The issue has a real economic impact: Researchers at the University of Toronto, UC Santa Barbara, and Zhejiang University found that deaf and hard-of-hearing couriers earned 10% less per hour than other colleagues. They also received more negative customer ratings and were more likely to make late deliveries.
In an effort to close that pay gap, three engineers at Taobao worked in their off hours to build a simple accessibility feature that allows workers to select preset messages (or write their own), and use the AI tool to call the customer and read out the message.