--- title: Milagros Miceli: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 description: Find out why Milagros Miceli made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. canonical: https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305825/milagros-miceli/ article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-08-26T19:02:28.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T11:54:42.274Z article:section: Business og:title: TIME100 AI 2025: Milagros Miceli og:description: Find out why Milagros Miceli made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence og:url: https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305825/milagros-miceli/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt49ee7ba08b792169/6998c92447fe51653b55bff4/Milagros-Miceli.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME100 AI 2025: Milagros Miceli og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: TIME100 AI 2025: Milagros Miceli twitter:description: Find out why Milagros Miceli made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt49ee7ba08b792169/6998c92447fe51653b55bff4/Milagros-Miceli.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Aug 26, 2025 # Milagros Miceli Founder, Data Workers' Inquiry by [Billy Perrigo](/author/billy-perrigo/) ## Billy Perrigo Correspondent  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Courtesy Photo) As a sociologist and computer scientist, Milagros Miceli made her name studying the working lives of AI data labelers. These are the people around the world—many of whom earn just dollars or pennies per hour—who create the training data for machine learning models, often in distressing, exploitative conditions. But Miceli grew uncomfortable after she realized that while she was winning plaudits for her work, nothing was changing in the invisible lives of her subjects. That’s when Miceli founded the Data Workers’ Inquiry: an academic project that puts power in the hands of AI data workers to publish research by and about themselves. The first cohort of 16 researchers spanned Kenya, Syria, Brazil, and Germany. They are paid the same wage—€35 per hour—as any other academic researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute in Germany, where Miceli is based. For many, that will be by far the highest wage they have ever earned in their life. Drawn lightly from [a model by Karl Marx](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/04/20.htm "undefined"), their work has yielded valuable academic insights. Because of their firsthand experience of data work, and deep social connections to other workers, the grassroots researchers have surfaced things that were “completely new” to even Miceli. One example: the prevalence of gender-based violence among data workers, including a case where two women were required to work in the same office as their alleged rapist—and who were unable to leave because their visas were tied to their employment status. “I would have needed to conduct thousands of interviews to maybe approach the same findings,” Miceli says. Miceli is also unapologetic about the Inquiry’s political dimension. “When you give back the epistemic authority, or the power to actually decide what is important and what is not, that research has double value,” Miceli says. “The first one is to the outside: to inform us about what’s going on. But also to the inside: because that’s research that is supporting organizing efforts. That’s research that matters to them, for them to collectivize and take action.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305825/milagros-miceli/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305825/milagros-miceli/"},"headline":"Milagros Miceli","datePublished":"2025-08-26T19:02:28.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T11:54:42.274Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305825/milagros-miceli/","keywords":["Tech","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades","TIME100 AI 2025"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt49ee7ba08b792169/6998c92447fe51653b55bff4/Milagros-Miceli.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Billy Perrigo","jobTitle":"Correspondent","url":"https://time.com/author/billy-perrigo/"}],"creator":"Billy Perrigo","articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt49ee7ba08b792169/6998c92447fe51653b55bff4/Milagros-Miceli.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305825/milagros-miceli/","name":"Milagros Miceli"}}]}] ```