What data do AI labs buy from companies?
October 26, 2026 · 6 min read
AI labs have already trained on the public web. What they license from companies is the record of how real work gets done: what went wrong, what people decided, what they did and how it turned out. Most companies already keep that record in the tools they use every day.
System by system
Email
Requests, approvals, negotiations and follow-ups between people who do the work.
Gmail, OutlookTeam chat
Where work gets coordinated day to day, including the reasoning behind decisions.
Slack, Microsoft TeamsCRM and sales pipelines
Deal histories that show how an opportunity moved from first contact to close or loss.
Salesforce, HubSpotSupport tickets
Problems with their full resolution: one of the clearest problem, decision, outcome records.
Zendesk, IntercomProcedures and knowledge bases
SOPs, playbooks, checklists and handover documents that say how the work should be done.
Notion, Confluence, SharePointProjects and tasks
Briefs, back-and-forth and finished results, captured end to end.
Jira, Asana, monday.comCode repositories
Commits, reviews and issues that explain why the code is the way it is.
GitHub, GitLabCall and meeting recordings
How teams talk through problems and make calls in real time.
Zoom, GongAccounting and ERP
Reconciliations, approvals and reporting workflows.
QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuiteDrawings and design
Engineering drawings, models and specs with their revision history.
AutoCAD, Revit, FigmaLab and quality records
Experiment histories, deviation investigations, corrective actions and tech transfer packages.
Benchling, MasterControlContracts
Contract workflows, review processes and governance documentation.
DocuSign, Ironclad
What labs value most
Sequences that connect a problem, a decision and an outcome, kept for years on the same tools. A support ticket with its full resolution, a project thread from brief to delivery, or a deviation investigation through to its corrective action teaches more than any single document. Records in English, in systems that can be counted and exported, are the easiest to license.
What labs pass on
- Marketing content on its own, sparse CRM fields and thin activity logs.
- Data the company doesn’t own or control, such as client deliverables at an agency.
- Patient, clinical, genomic and other highly regulated records that can’t be de-identified without breaking the workflow.
Is sensitive information included?
No. Buyers don’t need sensitive information, and it never reaches them. Names, customers and other identifying details are removed or replaced with consistent stand-ins before any lab sees a record, so the workflow survives without the people in it. Read how de-identification works and how we handle company data.
Questions
Can I sell my company's Slack data to AI companies?
Yes, if the company owns it and the conversations show real work being coordinated. Slack and Teams history is valuable when it spans years on the same tool. Messages are de-identified before any lab sees them.
Can a company sell its emails for AI training?
Yes. Email is one of the most common sources in a licence because it captures requests, approvals and decisions. Names, addresses and other identifying details are replaced first.
Do AI companies buy customer support tickets?
Yes. A ticket with its full resolution history is one of the clearest records of how a problem gets solved, which is exactly what labs train agents on.
Will the AI lab see customer or employee names?
No. Identifying details are removed or replaced with consistent stand-ins before any lab sees a record. See how de-identification works.
What data do AI labs not want?
Marketing content on its own, sparse CRM fields, thin activity logs, data the company doesn't own, and highly regulated records such as patient, clinical or genomic data.
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