Why UPWK is soaring today...

Upwork (UPWK) is kicking off the second quarter with momentum that caught Wall Street off guard.

The freelancing platform reported earnings after the bell yesterday and its stock is soaring today, as predicted on the LikeFolio Earnings Sheet.

UPWK revenue hit $192.7 million in Q1. Net income more than doubled to $37.7 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin reached 29%, the highest level in company history. Every key metric is moving in the right direction.

And if you listened to the earnings call, you might have picked up on a theme: AI is driving a shift among freelancers.

Lower-level work is fading. Proposal writing, first-draft copy, data sorting: these tasks are increasingly handled by AI. The freelancers gaining share now are doing work AI cannot complete on its own.

One Upwork client, a mid-size Florida law firm, hired a team of freelancers to build a custom GPT that organizes their legal archive and surfaces key information instantly. Another, a top pharmaceutical firm, relied on a South Carolina-based agency to develop low-code healthcare apps using LLMs.

These tasks are domain-specific, technically complex, and deeply embedded in the client’s workflow. Upwork is becoming a launchpad for that kind of technical work to increase efficiency and capacity without taking on a full-time employee.

The company reported +25% growth in AI-related gross services volume. Prompt engineering alone is up 52% year over year, noting “Today we have a deep reservoir of 80,000 AI specialists on our platform globally... and that pool is growing every day.”

On the product side, Uma—Upwork’s AI agent—is already making an impact. Proposal Writer usage jumped 58% quarter over quarter. AI-assisted features are improving match rates, cutting time-to-hire, and increasing freelancer earnings. Brown described it as a turning point: “We envision providing customers with a fully capable AI work agent... from informing hiring decisions to end-to-end project management.”

Preferences among consumer just entering the job market are fueling the gig fire at a high level.

According to a recent report from Ogilvy, Gen Z is bypassing the 9–5 and choosing freelance income.

• Over 400 million people now work in gig or contract settings globally.

• 44% of young professionals say they aren’t equipped for the roles they’re in.

• 61% are looking for AI-specific upskilling.

Platforms that can meet both needs—earning and learning—are becoming the default.

Upwork is benefiting in the short-term from a shift in how people work and what companies need.

Others are still scrambling to adapt.

Fiverr (FVRR), in particular, is in a dangerous spot.

Its business was built for speed: simple tasks, fixed prices, no hand-holding. That model worked when the value was in turnaround time. Now those tasks—logos, social media captions, blog posts—are being completed by generative AI in seconds. Fiverr’s core product is under pressure.And internally, leadership knows it. CEO Micha Kaufman recently told employees, “AI is coming for your job, and mine.”

Fiverr’s model, in its current form, cannot survive the next evolution of task automation.

Fiverr’s best-case scenario is reinvention. If it can build the infrastructure to deliver short, low-context tasks through AI agents—with optional human oversight—it could own the instant-delivery segment of digital work. That infrastructure doesn’t exist yet. If Fiverr builds it fast, there’s a real opportunity. If it hesitates, those tasks will vanish from the marketplace.

Uber (UBER) on the other hand, faces a different challenge, and a different kind of opportunity.

Its business relies on physical labor. Drivers complete real-world tasks in regulated markets with high insurance costs. That model has limits. But Uber is already planning for what comes next.

In the past six months, the company has signed or expanded partnerships with Waymo, WeRide, Pony.ai, May Mobility, and Momenta. Fully autonomous rides are active in Phoenix. Additional cities are coming online in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East.

Uber wants to handle the routing, pricing, and interface layer for autonomous fleets. The vehicles can change. The platform stays in control. If that model scales, Uber won’t rely on gig labor. It will manage transportation logistics the same way cloud platforms manage compute power.

The company isn’t there yet. But the direction is clear.

Uber reports earnings this week with its stock near all-time highs.

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