Ampliar el talento global requiere claridad. Mercor lo encontró con Insightful.

Mercor, a labor marketplace that connects skilled human contractors to AI labs and tech companies, is among the many AI-focused enterprises that are hyperscaling. Unfortunately, workforce fraud is rising simultaneously. A recent survey indicated 41% of IT, cybersecurity, risk, and fraud leaders know their companies have hired and onboarded a fraudulent candidate. Mercor had seen this work fraud occur firsthand in their contractor workforce when they chose to implement workforce analytics software.

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Mercor partnered with Insightful to solve this core issue inside the business: AI hyperscale workforce fraud prevention. By preventing fraudulent contractors in their marketplace from collecting payment for work not completed, Mercor saves up to $9 million per week in workforce fraud.

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The Challenge: Reliability at Hyperscale

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Remote work in a world of AI deep fakes and hallucinated content has created a new headache for employers: ensuring the work completed by their contract workforces is real and verifiable. 

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Shaun VanWeelden, Managing Director at Mercor said, “At our scale, it was really important that we had a product that we could systematically track time for all participants on our platform.” Managing a global contractor workforce of tens of thousands of engineers, reviewers, and domain experts across multiple time zones generates massive, concurrent streams of activity data — far beyond what legacy systems can reliably process. 

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Insightful is built on the Google Cloud Platform’s leading cloud infrastructure, and easily handles Mercor’s highest concurrency spikes while still delivering reliable data to their engineering team in near real-time.

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Not only do the tools need to work efficiently, but they also need to be reliable with a quickly growing company. 

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The Audit Layer for AI Scalers

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If reliability is the foundation, the audit layer that Insightful brings is the guardrail — detecting both innocuous outliers and intentional abuse by Mercor’s tens of thousands of contractors. In the context of AI hyperscale workforce fraud prevention, an effective audit system must distinguish real work from fabricated signals. Insightful brings audit tools for AI companies to ensure legitimate work is completed and delivered. This proved to be a perfect fit for Mercor’s requirements:

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Detection of Non‑Human Patterns

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Insightful’s platform interprets activity in real-time. For example:

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• Recognizing non‑human activity signatures, such as constant mouse jigglers, keyboard jamming, or session footprints inconsistent with human work rhythms. Insightful flags these to Mercor product and operations leaders so they can automate how they choose to handle these exception cases.
• Contrasting those signatures against validated activity profiles curated by Mercor engineers, enabling rulesets that flag improbable “work patterns” in seconds, not hours or days.

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The real-time data transmission was one of Mercor’s top requirements in their chosen platform. Insightful brings scalable user pattern recognition, which runs on Google Cloud high-speed cloud infrastructure, a critical tool for managing a widespread, asynchronous workforce.

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Intelligent Alerting Mechanisms

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Mercor needed to create escalation paths to resolve contractor disputes objectively and as fast as possible. Insightful platform architecture made it easy for Mercor to channel this data where they need it:

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• Red Flag alerts: automated triggers when activity deviates from defined norms, pushing anomalies directly to Mercor’s ops and compliance teams.
• Performance trend insights: dashboards highlighting top 10% performers or unusually low activity stretches from specific contractors, which help trade off work fraud detection with healthy performance insights on the workforce.
• Top performer replication: Insightful reveals how Mercor's top 10% performers work, then makes those patterns copyable across everyone else. Ops can replicate top-tier execution at scale, turning every workforce assignment into a competitive edge against other reinforcement learning platforms.
• Over-logging prevention: Insightful gives Mercor an automated time limit feature to cap how many hours contractors can log per project and per week. This plays an important role in cost control and billing accuracy at scale and helps their ops team keep individual projects on budget.

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These capabilities give both Mercor and its AI lab clients visibility into what workers are doing, and the ability to verify work authenticity. Insightful provides granularity down to the individual worker.

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Postman-Ready API Built for AI Builders

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For AI companies, a vendor that forces manual processes is not a partner; it’s a burden. Insightful’s platform embraces an API‑First architecture that lets engineering teams like Mercor’s integrate audit tooling directly into their workflows, SDKs, and operational backbone. This level of integration accelerates automation and enables creating a fine-tuned “workforce stack,” which is a game-changer for Mercor. 

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True Root‑Level Connectivity

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Rather than bolt on a separate time‑tracking tool, Mercor engineers plugged Insightful APIs into internal systems that:

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• Collect activity metadata alongside task outputs, enabling correlation between time invested and deliverables generated.
• Sync detail straight into Mercor’s billing pipelines, compliance modules, and client invoicing systems.
• Feed alerts and metrics into Mercor’s own monitoring dashboards and event triggers.

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Artemas Radik, the Head of Platform at Mercor, says Insightful is “built by engineers, for engineers,” a major reason that he authorized the partnership in the first place. Engineering teams don’t need to work around the audit system; they incorporate it into standard flows such as hiring, onboarding, compliance checks, and payouts.

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Hard ROI and Scaled Upside

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Before Insightful, Mercor’s tools struggled with inaccurate time tracking and work fraud ambiguity, often leading to issues like:

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• Overbilling clients based on estimated or unverifiable hours.
• Excess engineering hours spent reconciling disputed data.
• Lost productivity from unpredictable global task outputs.

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With Insightful, Mercor is now able to validate remote work and eliminate bad data and slow processes from its billing pipeline. As one Mercor executive put it, the platform’s data serves as the core source of truth for payment and compliance decisions, dramatically tightening margins on large client contracts each worth several million dollars a week.

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As Mercor scales:

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• These savings compound, especially as more clients demand transparent auditability before engaging a global contractor workforce.
• Engineering teams spend less time on internal maintenance and incident response, instead focusing on product improvements and custom tooling. Mercor estimates six-figure savings in engineering staff costs alone.
• Mercor can use price transparency and verified productivity as part of its value proposition to AI labs, moving beyond mere staffing toward trust‑based outcome delivery for its major clients.