Shift, a German tech startup, began offering New York City residents free home cleaning services on May 28, 2026, in exchange for first-person video recordings of professional cleaners wearing head-mounted cameras while performing chores [1].
The footage collected will be used to train AI systems and autonomous household robots to perform cleaning tasks. Shift automatically blurs or anonymizes sensitive personal information in the videos using machine learning models before uploading them to the cloud [1, 2, 3].
Shift’s co-CEO and co-founder Bercan Kilic said the company aims to accelerate embodied AI by building a large dataset of real-world cleaning actions [2]. According to the startup’s website, "You get a spotless apartment. We get training data. Everyone wins," highlighting the exchange for users [2].
The cleaning is conducted by vetted professional cleaners who are not Shift employees but partner contractors. Cleaners can decline any task they are uncomfortable with [2, 3]. Shift also notes that more challenging and dirtier cleaning environments are particularly valuable for robot training [2, 3].
Currently, Shift operates in more than 15 countries worldwide where thousands of people contribute videos for various AI training projects, but the free cleaning service with video recording is newly available only in New York City [2, 3]. The startup plans to expand the service soon to San Francisco, London, Zurich, and Munich [2].
The free cleaning offer is available for a limited time, incentivizing early participation and video collection for AI model development [2, 3].
Shift’s public launch of the NYC cleaning program on May 28 marks a push to gather detailed, real-world robotic training data from household environments.
