Articles

Introducing Domain Experts: Evaluate and Annotate your AI with Verified Experts

Samara Zauhy

|April 24, 2025

The race to build more capable AI models has created an urgent demand for specialized knowledge that comes from deep domain expertise and goes beyond basic data labeling or annotation. With frontier models now making high-stakes decisions in healthcare, finance, and legal domains, the talent gap between available expertise and development needs has become a bottleneck.

In this new era of specialised AI, domain experts aren’t a bonus—they’re a prerequisite. They provide the nuance, precision, and professional judgment foundational to trustworthy, high-performing AI.

The domain expert challenge

AI researchers and developers face critical limitations when sourcing specialized human data:

Traditional labeling services offer minimal transparency in their expert verification process, leaving you uncertain about the quality of your training data.
Building in-house teams guarantees quality but creates significant delays with lengthy hiring cycles and onboarding processes.
Relying on internal employees works for small-scale projects but quickly becomes unsustainable when you need to scale your data collection.

Prolific Domain Experts solves this challenge by connecting you directly with a rigorously vetted pool of specialists across healthcare, STEM, programming, languages, and more to deliver the expert data you need in hours, not months.

What are Domain Experts?

Domain Experts are specialists with verified expertise in fields like healthcare, STEM, programming, and languages, ready to bring genuine professional knowledge to your AI development projects.

Our current pool includes over 1,500 verified experts spanning multiple disciplines:

Languages: Specialists across Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Mandarin, French, and more.
Healthcare: Medical professionals including GPs, neurologists, psychiatrists, dermatologists, and more from both UK and US medical systems.
STEM: Experts in biology, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, physics, and other scientific fields.
Programming: Developers proficient in Python, JavaScript, Java, and SQL.

Plus, we’re actively expanding our pool all the time to give you access to the best experts in their professions.

How we verify Domain Experts

We don't just ask people if they're experts. We verify their expertise through multiple layers, including:

Skills assessments tailored to their specific expertise
Review of academic credentials, publications, and h-index scores
Validation of relevant work experience

Our verification process adapts to each specialty.

Healthcare professionals submit license documentation and complete clinical assessments. STEM experts demonstrate knowledge through field-specific tests and academic verification. Programmers solve real coding challenges in their claimed languages, while language specialists undergo fluency testing with native speakers.

This way, you're working with genuine experts who bring reliable professional knowledge to your AI projects.

How Domain Experts work

Using Domain Experts on Prolific is straightforward, whether you’re going through our interface or API integration. Here's how to get started:

Through our interface

Navigate to 'Recruit participants' on your study setup page, select 'Find domain experts on Prolific', then choose your required expertise from the dropdown menu. You'll see the available expert count before launching.

Or, navigate to the ‘Participant’ tab on the sidebar and choose the subject matter expert you want under ‘Do you want verified Domain Experts?.’

Via API

First discover available experts using Custom Groups, then apply expert filters following our documentation, and finally launch your study with a filter for your chosen expert group. For examples and detailed implementation guidance, refer to our API documentation.

We recommend rates starting at

$30/hour for language specialists
$50/hour for STEM and programming experts
$100/hour for healthcare professionals and senior experts, with higher rates for longer tasks

How organizations use Prolific’s experts

Here is how two organizations used specialist participants in our Global Crowd to collect data for their AI research. Our verified Domain Experts will make this kind of research even smoother, with experts that are thoroughly checked for the highest level of specialism in their fields.

Shovels: Finding construction industry specialists for AI development

Shovels, an AI-driven intelligence platform for the construction industry, needed annotators fluent in building permit language and regulatory nuance. Using Prolific, they sourced vetted industry experts—each with 100+ relevant tasks completed and a 98%+ approval rate—to generate high-quality labeled data and accelerate model training.

Prolific was a great choice. It made a significant difference for us because we easily found participants who were vetted and also experienced in the specific industry that we needed.
Petra Kopić, Data Engineer, Shovels

Carnegie Mellon University: creating specialized datasets for text-to-image AI research

PhD researcher Frederic Gmeiner at Carnegie Mellon's HCI Institute built a pioneering dataset on how professional illustrators co-create with text-to-image AI. Prolific’s precision screening connected his team with top-tier illustrators from publishing, media, and advertising, enabling research into AI as a true creative collaborator, not just a tool.

Where you can use Domain Experts

Here are four ways you can use Domain Experts in your AI projects:

Fine-tuning domain-specific models: Specialist models need expert-labeled data. A medical AI, for instance, can be fine-tuned using radiology notes labeled by radiologists to better understand clinical terminology and decision-making standards.
Expert review for output quality: Professionals ensure AI outputs meet field-specific standards. Financial analysts can validate summaries for clarity, compliance, and accuracy that general reviewers might miss.
Factual checks in technical domains: Domain experts catch nuanced inaccuracies. A historian, for example, can flag anachronisms in AI-generated content on 19th-century politics to protect model credibility.
Stress-testing for safety: Experts probe models with edge cases. For instance, legal and cybersecurity professionals can challenge AIs with ambiguous clauses or rare phishing attacks to reveal vulnerabilities and improve robustness.

Backed by over a decade of academic research, our participant pool was designed from the ground up to prioritize data quality. Our Domain Experts pool follows the same gold standard: ethical oversight, fair pay, and rigorous screening. The result is reliable, real-world-ready data with zero tolerance for shortcuts or hidden compromises.