Tyler Le/BIAs they race to automate white-collar work, AI labs have found the perfect source of training data: your Slack DMs.Business owners are getting six-figure "exploding offers" that expire in 48 hours to sell their data. Instagram is flooded with ads declaring that "AI needs your data" and promising millions. The data is priced by the terabyte, anonymized, and sold to AI giants desperate for an edge.Tech giants have moved to harvest their employees' data for AI training. And, once focused on dead startups, brokers now pay for live data from active companies."Right now, the demand is just astronomical," said Dan Novaes, the CEO of Mode.Inc, a startup that sells data to AI model developers.Mundane workplace data is more valuable than ever as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others build AI agents for businesses. Annual spending on data for AI is projected to explode from less than $1 billion last year to almost $6.5 billion in 2027, Gartner estimates.The boom has a darker side. Employees rarely profit from — or know about — their Slacks, PowerPoints, and Google Docs being sold to the highest bidder. Suspected hackers have shopped around a large company's stolen codebase for millions of dollars. Meta's attempt to harvest its own employees' data for its AI models sparked a revolt. This story is part of a series called The AI Data Grab, an inside look at how tech giants are increasingly turning to workers, users, and the physical world to get data to train AI. Read more stories in this series here. Some CEOs are getting blindsided. Doug Kreuzkamp, who runs airline operations company Springshot, was sitting in his office on a Zoom call in August when he found out that Google had bought his data. Springshot, a longtime vendor for the now-bankrupt Spirit Airlines, helped flights coordinate with workers such as gate agents and cleaners.Bankrupt Spirit Airlines is selling off its data.The Dallas Morning News/ Getty Images"I had less than 48 hours' notice — from the media — that the intellectual property we had spent 15 years building could be given away," Kreuzkamp told Business Insider.The surging market is pushing into uncharted waters, and the industry risks a reckoning with workers and regulators, said Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Emory University. The lack of federal privacy laws leaves few legal barriers to companies collecting data from their employees for AI training, she added."The question is, does the consent of the employees from whom they collected that data actually extend to the sale of the data? I think it's an ethically gray area," Ajunwa said.Business data has become the new oilThe boom has created a thriving group of go-betweens who hunt for small businesses rich in data and low on cash. After scrubbing sensitive information like Social Security numbers and home addresses, they resell it to AI giants.Although the industry is new, it's become highly competitive. Ryan Lock, cofounder of AI broker Polyshares, compares it to the oil boom that hit Texas in the early 1900s, when prospectors snapped up cheap land from farmers who didn't realize the true value of the oil underneath it.Small-business owners sitting on troves of internal records may not realize the seemingly mundane files could be worth big money. Tactics like 48-hour deadlines have become common, Lock said."The offers being made look almost identical to those early oil offers," he said from his home base in Dallas. "They'll say, 'I'm offering you double market. I need an answer by Friday.'"Pumpjacks operating in the Permian Basin in Texas.Bloomberg/Getty ImagesLock and his cofounders went through the data-licensing process themselves with their other companies, sometimes laughing out loud at the lowball offers they got. Their firm tries to bridge that information gap by giving business owners more transparency about what their data is worth."There's still plenty of money for everyone, but business owners should receive more of the benefit," he said.Wanted: data from companies, dead or aliveData that demonstrates how work is actually done is highly valuable, said William Almeida, the chief revenue officer of AI training startup Micro1, because it provides critical context on how decisions are made and products are built.That information can help train agents, the autonomous computer-using AI tools that have become a major focus for companies like Meta and SpaceXAI. As AI companies build new models, the real-world data guides the AI on how best to handle specific tasks.Micro1 announced a program earlier this year that pays midsize companies $100,000 to $2 million for access to anonymized data. Almeida said AI developers increasingly want "long-horizon" data that can provide a full picture of how work gets done. If a company won't sell its Slack, customer relationship management, or email records, the rest of the corpus is less valuable.The data is priced based on a multitude of factors, with volume being
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