Digital platforms create value for their users by providing an efficient infrastructure for matching supply and demand for skills and labour. It acts as a marketplace where professionals and clients meet, bargain and agree on a contract to solve a task or begin a project, using a standardised contractual framework.

While the term “gig economy” has traditionally been associated with rideshare drivers, Airbnb hosts and labour-intensive work, or freelancers in mostly creative fields, there is now, amidst lockdowns and WFH, growing demand from the business world for knowledge-intensive work.

Professionals with expertise in areas such as accounting, project management, business analysis and management, engineering, digitisation and technology, and brand marketing are finding themselves in high demand for projects across all sectors. In the era of remote working and digital platforms, companies are no longer structuring people’s jobs around broadly defined roles, but instead a series of deliverables and projects, with targets to meet within a given timeframe. Digital platforms are enabling the managing and the solving of knowledge-intensive work, in the face of the remote working landscape.

Professionals can now hold two jobs while in WFH, now in self-employment and the other, as a steady employee of an organisation.

The knowledge-intensive gig ecosystem runs on intellectual capital that is intangible, much like human capital. Firms are increasingly perceiving digital platforms as useful, reliable tools for accessing these commercial assets and services. For society as a whole, digital platforms can help increase both labour supply and knowledge-sharing in the economy.