The robot future is here: Former Lyft drivers in Nashville are now cleaning Waymos  — how AI is transforming gig-work jobs

Jonathan Baines is one of them. He spent roughly a decade driving for Lyft while pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter. Today, he helps oversee Waymo’s fleet of fully autonomous robotaxis, which use cameras, radar and lidar sensors to navigate city streets without a human driver behind the wheel.

As a fleet operations lead at a Nashville facility run by Lyft’s Flexdrive subsidiary, Baines helps move robotaxis through the depot and determine when they are ready to return to passengers.

“It’s new. It’s innovative,” Baines told Business Insider. “This is going to give me opportunities within the AV industry, here within Lyft and Flexdrive, that I wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Changing industries as automation takes over

That shift toward jobs that involve working alongside AI is already showing up across industries. Goldman Sachs research found that occupations with greater potential for AI augmentation added roughly 9,000 jobs a month over the past year, while unemployment in those fields edged slightly lower. In other words, the technology may be reducing demand for some types of work while creating new roles built around supporting and working alongside the machines.

Baines is hardly alone in making that transition. Chauncey Thompson, who spent roughly a decade working in the rental-car industry before driving for Lyft, now works as a fleet operations associate, a job he told Business Insider that he strongly prefers to being behind the wheel.

Waymo’s vehicles can run their own diagnostics and flag potential problems, but they still need workers to visually inspect them, clean and charge them, and catch the things the software cannot. The job has not disappeared so much as moved: from driving the car to keeping the car ready to drive itself.

And human drivers are not expected to disappear anytime soon. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment for taxi drivers, a category that includes ride-hailing drivers, to grow about 9% between 2025 and 2035.

Autonomous doesn’t mean hands-off

Waymo’s vehicles may be self-driving, but keeping them on the road still requires plenty of human intervention.

Flexdrive CEO John Parks told Business Insider its autonomous fleet demands more day-to-day attention than its traditional rental business, with cleaning, charging, inspections and repairs all handled at company depots.

And sometimes the cars create problems of their own. Waymo, which shares a parent company with Google, has been racking up parking and traffic violations as its fleet expands. In Austin, Texas, the company has already paid $7,433 in fines and has another $1,892 in violations that remain unsettled.

The vehicles also rack up far more mileage. Parks said a robotaxi could travel as much as 100,000 miles a year, compared with roughly 40,000 miles for a vehicle in Flexdrive’s rental fleet, putting additional wear on the cars and increasing the amount of attention they require.

Flexdrive’s Nashville Waymo depot is expected to employ about 70 people as the fleet expands. Workers are needed to keep that operation running, whether that means dealing with malfunctioning chargers or troubleshooting vehicles that disrupt depot operations.

“I miss driving because I love interacting with people,” Baines said. “But in terms of the actual work itself, I love this more.”

What this means for gig workers

For gig workers, the AI shift may not happen all at once. Instead, the job could slowly start to look different.