Phillip An

Phillip An (BS ’18) builds AI tools for a living. He is the co-founder and CEO of Skylarq AI, which automates professional workflows for sales teams, and His career has focused on building and scaling technology products. His Chang Prize project turns that expertise toward a different question: Over nine months, Phillip plans to conduct field research across Vietnam, China, the Philippines, and India, documenting the jobs emerging in the space between human labor and full automation.

These roles—including robot teleoperators in Vietnam, AI fleet monitors in China, data annotators in the Philippines, and human-AI auditors in India—are evolving rapidly and are often poorly captured by conventional labor data and career frameworks. Phillip plans to conduct more than 100 interviews across the four countries, shadowing workers and managers to record the actual tasks, skills, tools, and pay behind each role. The planned result is the New Work Atlas, an open-access taxonomy that maps the emerging jobs documented through the project by skill requirements, entry barriers, reported pay and wage prospects, durability, and which adjacent careers those skills lead to.

The window to study this work is narrow, since many of these transitional roles will themselves be automated within a few years. Phillip will publish the Atlas free in English, Mandarin, and Vietnamese, paired with a policy brief intended for institutions such as the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and the International Labour Organization, and a plain-language career navigator co-designed with the workers themselves. He will present his findings to the Caltech community at the project’s close.