Appen's Competitive Moat, page-3

You raise good points in that the average investor cannot easily make any reasonable assumptions on the business beyond the balance sheet. Talking with some of Appens customers would be highly valuable and provide the type of insight that more sophisticated investors can do. Appens clients seem to be, historically, working in areas where their IP is market sensitive and hence unlikely to be disclosed.

Another element worth considering is the niche these clients work in and whether Appen can service them, i.e. lets say a client works in the medical imaging sector. Appen would ideally need a load of medical specialists to service such a contract - I doubt they have access to such specialised individuals to sit infront of their screens and annotate hundreds of thousands of scans. They could however leverage machine learning and have a specialist annotate or check samples of the data sets. It's more likely a specialist service is already in this niche and setting up to dominate it.

It appears to be an inflection point for the company where they diverge from the lucrative but diminished 'old' and choose a path for the 'new'.