What's wrong with Appen's business?

Hi all,

Appen has been on my watchlist for a while. Unfortunately the fundamentals are rather poor at the moment, so I am not tempted to invest in it, but I am extremely curious why did Appen not do well as a business (at least so far).

I am in the IT for my entire professional career so I understand the value they are offering to businesses. And that is what makes it even weirder for me - at the time of the bubble-like AI&ML hype their services to provide structured processed data to the companies should be in high demand. After all, to train an ML model you need processed and structured data. So I am genuinely wondering what went wrong. Have their customers developed similar capabilities in-house? Was there a technology shift to make their services obsolete? Did they lose to a more successful competitor?

They were quite profitable until 2021, so their business model was viable at some point. I get the inflation and the rate rises, but the magnitude of decline for a service that is supposed to be in demand is quite unusual.

I am sure there are people here with much better knowledge of the company than I, would be great to hear from them.

Good luck to holders, hope it turns around.