iMerit Launches Scholars Platform to Connect AI Developers With Domain Experts

The existing iMerit community includes more than 30,000 vetted professionals in 118 countries, spanning 106 languages and disciplines such as medicine, mathematics, agriculture and autonomous systems, the company said.

iMerit said the launch reflects a shift in AI development from building increasingly capable foundation models to adapting those models for specific applications, especially in regulated industries including healthcare, banking and insurance. “It’s like having a product and saying, ‘What are we going to do with it?’” said Radha Basu, executive vice president and head of iMerit at EXL. She said specialized human expertise becomes more important as enterprises deploy AI in applications where errors can carry serious consequences.

The platform provides centralized tools for recruiting, onboarding, evaluating, assigning and compensating experts. It is built around iMerit’s proprietary Ango Hub data annotation, workflow automation and model fine-tuning platform and supports collaboration on multimodal training data, model evaluation and feedback workflows. Payment processing and compliance capabilities are provided through an integration with Trolley Technologies Inc.

Unlike conventional data labeling services, iMerit says its specialists are expected to challenge AI models and identify mistakes that automated evaluations might miss. “We call it tormenting models,” Basu said. “Question the model, question the model to make sure it’s working, actually try to break it.”

To qualify participants, iMerit uses a three-tier assessment process. Initial screening evaluates general AI capabilities and cognitive skills. Later assessments examine domain-specific qualifications and the ability to work effectively with AI models. The most specialized evaluations involve peer reviews conducted by other experts.

iMerit manages customer projects directly rather than only matching clients with independent contractors, taking responsibility for project management, quality assurance and auditing. Experts are compensated for individual engagements but remain part of the broader Scholars community. Basu said maintaining long-term relationships matters because specialists build knowledge about models across successive evaluation and training cycles.

The company offers several pricing arrangements, including hourly rates based on expertise, contracts tied to specified deliverables and engagements linked to measurable outcomes. Basu cited agricultural models that identify early crop failures as an example of work that could be evaluated against performance targets. iMerit said it can also accommodate sharply fluctuating demand; Basu recalled a customer requesting about 400 additional workers within three or four days.

The EXL acquisition gives iMerit access to additional healthcare and insurance expertise, expanding its ability to support enterprise-specific AI applications. Basu said the company particularly wants to broaden its coverage of specialized disciplines and languages. “Our biggest need right now is to go into new expertise, scale into newer languages and into newer levels of the same expertise,” she said.