Why an AI company cleaned my New York City apartment for free

Why an AI company cleaned my New York City apartment for freeImage source, ShiftImage caption, Adverts featuring camera-clad cleaners are on display around New York CityByArchie MitchellBusiness reporterPublished21 June 2026Picture this: a team of camera-clad cleaners and a private chef to boot, all wired with high-tech recording apparatus show up at your home.You are not part of a reality TV show, and have not woken up in an Aldous Huxley or Margaret Atwood novel.Instead, you are a resident of New York City, where AI companies are sending free cooking and cleaning staff straight to people's doors.But, there is a catch: this AI company is gathering data to train the next generation of cooking and cleaning robots, and every inch of your apartment is now being recorded.The initiative, dubbed Shift by AI firm Micro AGI, is part of a growing number of companies developing the next generation of autonomous robots, which tech bosses hope will be able to do everything from the washing up to serving as live-in personal carers.At my apartment on New York's Upper East Side, I am greeted by two mid-twenties college graduates who have bounced around the start-up world and were looking for work.Because demand for the free cleans is so high, they are stationed in New York indefinitely, cleaning around five apartments a day, five days a week. The only difference between these guys and a regular cleaner is they have built-in cameras attached to their caps, connected via a lead to their mobile phones.The main aim of the offer is to perform tasks requiring dexterity, to train the robots of the future to use their hands. As a result, the cleaners were intensely focused on their hands while carrying out the job.'Tonnes' of dataBercan Kilic, Shift's founder, told the BBC the goal of the data-gathering exercise is "to advance humanity".He pointed to existing AI models such as ChatGPT, which are able to create sentences based on previously written passag...