About 350,000 young freelancers in Bangladesh earn more than a billion dollars a year. That is the informal estimate of the past few years. But the rise of artificial intelligence, or AI, has put the future of small digital jobs under serious challenge.
A large share of the country’s freelancers do simple, small jobs for foreign clients on various digital platforms, such as data entry, translation, transcription and photo editing.
But artificial intelligence can now produce designs, coding, photo editing and other digital work within moments. As a result freelancers’ earnings have fallen by as much as 80 percent.
Freelancers said offers of regular work from foreign clients no longer come as they used to. And the work that does come takes much less time to finish than before, thanks to AI.
Specialists in digital services say artificial intelligence is changing the whole picture of the freelancing market.
There is now little prospect of getting a 10-dollar logo design job from a company in a country such as the United States, because clients use AI tools to produce the first version of the logo themselves.
Instead, they do not hesitate to pay a skilled freelancer 100 dollars to perfect and customise an entire multimedia campaign generated with AI.
In the view of digital specialists, this shift from simple work to complex work may wipe out many low-paid jobs, but it will open the door to far more profitable opportunities for those able to adapt to the change.
Earnings down by as much as 80 percent
Speaking to The Daily Star, several freelancers in Bangladesh said the volume of their work had fallen dramatically. Demand has dropped sharply in particular for established kinds of work such as graphic design, photo editing, web development, content production and photography.
Emrazina Islam has been freelancing since 2011. She said her income had fallen by more than 80 percent after she lost a major client.
“We had been working for a company since 2012. At one point there were 15 people in our team,” she said.
The company also provided them with an office and laptops. The size of the team even grew during the Covid pandemic as the company’s business expanded.
But, the freelancer said with regret: “After artificial intelligence arrived, our whole business shut down.”
The kinds of work Emrazina’s team used to do — graphic design, image editing and project management — are now all being done with AI.
She said the effect is not confined to design. Web development work has changed too. Jobs that once needed a very large team are now being finished by very few people using AI tools.
Those who depend on basic skills such as ordinary content writing, photo editing and data entry are under the greatest pressure, she said.
Yusuf Tushar, who has worked in photography for about 20 years, said AI-generated images had greatly reduced demand for commercial photography. Clients once depended on photographers for pictures of products or models, or for stock photography.
Now many companies use AI to produce the images they need without any shoot or trouble at all.
Yusuf Tushar said: “A large part of my income is now gone, because clients think that if they need an image for an advertisement they can make it with AI themselves.”
Yusuf Tushar said his income had fallen by about 50 percent because of AI.
In Tushar’s view the collapse is most visible in stock photography. Clients no longer feel the need to buy images for calendars or other commercial work.
He said the change is somewhat like earlier technological shifts.
“There was a shock when we were getting used to digital cameras after film cameras too. But the impact of AI is far bigger than that.”
Kazi Mamun, a freelancer in Dhaka, has been freelancing for about 14 years. He said the opportunities for work in the market have shrunk, while competition for the little work that remains has grown far sharper than before.
Mamun said the volume of his own work had fallen by about 25 percent. He is able to manage the situation to some extent because of long-standing direct clients. His five-member team is now putting more emphasis on finding new clients directly, rather than depending entirely on global freelancing platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr.
Mamun said: “Many people’s volume of work has halved, and for some it has fallen by up to 70 percent. Some have even been forced to leave the freelancing marketplaces.”
He added: “Clients are now trying to do a lot of the work themselves. They no longer hire freelancers for small projects as they used to.”
AI is also creating better-paid work
In place of simple and repetitive work, demand and pay for AI-related work are both rising on online freelancing marketplaces.
Research by Upwork found that the volume of AI-related work on its platform in the first quarter of 2025 was 25 percent higher than a year earlier. Prompt engineering work rose by 52 percent over the same period.
Those working with AI are paid more than 40 percent more on average than freelancers doing ordinary work.
The effect is being seen somewhat differently in Bangladesh, however, because AI can now easily do the entry-level or ordinary work that the country’s freelancers mainly perform.
Emrazina Islam said: “If someone becomes very skilled at AI, their future is very bright. Anyone who does not learn AI will fall behind.”
The technology entrepreneur and former president of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS), Fahim Mashroor, said the global services market is rapidly becoming AI-driven. Bangladesh must turn its attention urgently, and now, to producing a workforce skilled enough to survive in that market.
Training needs to change too
The freelancer Emrazina said the future of the ordinary work that used to be in demand is not very bright. Alongside their core skills, local freelancers now need to focus on reasoning, problem-solving skills and project management.
The chairman of the Bangladesh Freelancing Development Society (BFDS), Tanjiba Rahman, said AI is indeed changing the freelancing market fast, but the greatest concern is that the country’s training system is not keeping pace with that change.
Tanjiba told The Daily Star: “The kind of training we are giving in Bangladesh at present is essentially entry level. And that is exactly why we are no longer getting work as we used to.”
In her view the thing to fear is not that AI will finish off all freelancing work. The real risk is that Bangladesh will fall behind in the competition if its freelancers remain confined to the kind of work AI can now do easily.
She pointed to specialised fields such as mathematics, statistics and research, where opportunities remain plentiful but Bangladeshi freelancers have done very little work.
She also stressed that clients still place value on work requiring creativity and human judgement.
Tanjiba added: “We have to make sure of two things. First, acquiring higher skills; and second, producing mentors or trainers in the country who can give freelancers the information and guidance to keep pace with changes in the international market.”
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report