Mo Zohurian had 15 years of experience in sales and entrepreneurship, but after moving to Canada, he couldn’t find a regular job for almost a year. Then he accepted an ad on LinkedIn for AI training for $15 an hour. A few years later, this temporary part-time job turned into his main profession, and the rate increased to $100 an hour.
Mo Zohurian had 15 years of experience in sales and entrepreneurship, but after moving to Canada, he couldn’t find a regular job for almost a year. Then he accepted an ad on LinkedIn for AI training for $15 an hour. A few years later, this temporary part-time job turned into his main profession, and the rate increased to $100 an hour.
Zohuryan told Business Insider about his story.
Zohurian moved from Iran to Canada in 2023. Despite his experience, he couldn’t find a job in his field. After about 10 months of searching, he saw a job posting on LinkedIn offering $15 per hour to train AI with no prior experience.
At first, he had to create prompts, write or compare AI answers, and explain which answer was better and why. After about three months, Zohuryan landed a project at a rate of $30 per hour. He also started taking internal platform tests. For example, in English literature, logical reasoning, and mathematics. So he raised the rate to $35.
Later, the man began working for several companies at the same time. He could be paid $45 or $70 per hour for different projects, but there was no stable rate. One task could be paid worse than another. Everything changed when AI companies began looking for specialists in specific professions.
Initially, specialized AI projects were mostly looking for programmers, physicists, chemists, and other technical specialists. When the tasks for sales experts appeared, Zohuryan already had a good work history and high ratings on the platforms. His 15 years of experience in sales management became his main competitive advantage. For the past 10 months, he says, he has been regularly working on such projects for $100 an hour.
Statistics also confirm Zohuryan’s words. For example, the Mercor platform, which is looking for specialists for AI training, in its current guide estimates basic tasks in AI markup and training at approximately $12–25 per hour, the work of experienced universal AI trainers at $25–53, and narrow-profile specialists at $75–200+ per hour. In addition, the Mercor website now also has separate vacancies for business specialists. For example, B2B sales experts are currently offered $100–150 per hour.
However, $100 an hour doesn’t always translate to 40 billable hours per week. Zohuryan typically spends 20 to 40 hours a week training AI, but he can take a week, two, or even a month off between projects. That’s why he works on multiple platforms at once.
About three months into the job, he stopped applying for traditional full-time jobs. He finally decided to pursue a career in AI about a year later. Zohuryan now also consults with small businesses on AI and has launched Annotation Academy, a platform where he trains others to become AI trainers.
However, this area remains volatile. For example, dev.ua previously reported that Mercor, after completing a large project for Meta, terminated cooperation with thousands of contractors, and offered some of them a similar job at a rate of $16 per hour.
