I've never had this happen to me, so I wanted to share it and see if anyone else had a similar experience.
This is the alert I got. When I click it, it takes me to a job posting that appears to only have one applicant who boosted his proposals with 99 Connects. Is the platform bugging out or what's happening?
I’m from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and contact lenses are relatively cheap there compared to here (I usually use Acuvue Moist by Johnson & Johnson).
I recently visited a few stores in Lagoona Mall, and the prices are actually more expensive than back home, despite there being no taxes here. Is there anywhere you guys would recommend that's actually affordable?
I’ve seen some websites online, like Eyenk, where the prices seem relatively low, but I want to know if there are there physical stores I can visit.
If you're planning to stay on Upwork, you should know about this because Upwork is not going to give up on AI.
In May, Upwork published the Q1 2026 Earnings Conference Call.
We previously had a thread on this topic, but I decided to listen to it myself and see if there's anything else worthwhile in the call. It turns out that there is (the transcript below is AI-generated, it might have minor errors but the gist of it is correct).
In the future, UMA is going to have a more important role, and it is apparently going to be given more power when it comes to hiring decisions (said around 6:30 in the call):
>In our Spring 2026 Upwork updates, we launched features which make UMA a more capable agent that synthesizes hiring insights, assists in evaluating candidates and helps move decisions forward so SMBs can hire faster and with greater confidence.
In 2026, Upwork is planning to launch "project continuity offers" (around 7:00 in the call):
>We also are rolling out a new project continuity offering in which we seamlessly source replacement talent if a hire is not working out.
Also in 2026, Upwork is planning to launch human-supervised AI agents (at around 7:45 into the call):
>Our platform uniquely positions us to offer human supervised agents at scale. The AI agent market is estimated to be $120 billion by 2028. We're building on our strong marketplace chops to extend our supply and demand sides to include AI agents. Our human supervised agent solution was in beta in Q2 and is receiving extremely positive customer feedback. Businesses report an ongoing and increasing need to add a human layer of oversight to AI agents and we are evolving our marketplace to meet this demand.
Finally, there was mention of an "AI data opportunity" (at around 8:40 into the call):
>Finally, we are just scratching the surface on our AI data opportunity. As AI data needs evolve from synthetic and static datasets toward real-time learning scenarios, we believe Upwork has a unique role to play. With three million job posts per year across more than 125 categories, we are in early stages of exploring what this could look like in a way that enhances our platform and adds value for customers. We're building rapidly and with focus in this area, which will be upside to our model.
Related, said around 27:20 in the call:
>I think a good example of this is what Meta just announced [look up "Meta pauses tracking employees because of keystrokes leak"] in the last few weeks around tracking, you know, computer activity inside their own organization. You know, there's a real need for companies to have more of these environments to deploy agents within to learn and to access the data that generate is generated from work activity actually happening end to end. So we've been approached by numerous players on this topic.
Upwork's stock price dropped by 84% in the last five years, and it seems to me that Upwork doesn't know how to innovate other than to double down on the AI nonsense, so expect to see more of it and make a plan on how to deal with it.
Upwork will release its Second Quarter Financial Results Report on August 10.
This is the Writing category.
If you do the math, you'll get:
this client posted a new job roughly every 5 days for 16 years straight.
on ~15/16 job postings, the client closed it without hiring anyone.
every ~80 days, the client hired someone and paid the freelancer ~$7.5k.
I checked the job history for this client. It's for customer support in non-English languages.