AI data brokers are buying Slack, email and CRM from live US companies
What's the story? Frontier labs have largely exhausted the public internet as training fuel. A new layer of intermediaries, often called AI data brokers or data labs, now finds operating businesses with the right archives, de-identifies the material, packages it, and sells it onward for agent and enterprise-model training. Business Insider reported on 13 October 2026 that brokers have moved beyond dead startups to paying live companies six-figure sums for Slack DMs, emails, CRM history and project files, often with 48-hour "exploding" offers.
What buyers want: The prize is full-context "long-horizon" workflow data, not a single dump of tickets. William Almeida of micro1 told Business Insider that if a company will not sell Slack, CRM or email, the rest of the corpus is less valuable. Brokers describe the ideal package as the chain from a client email through internal Slack debate, rejected options, the chosen fix and the reply, spanning CRM, tickets and drives.
Who is buying the archives: PolysharesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, co-founded by Ryan LockDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, says on its site that it buys operational records as principal (Slack, email, Drive, CRM, tickets, call recordings, ERP), pays typical licences of $100K to $2M and above, and supplies AI labs without naming them. Mode.IncDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, led by Dan NovaesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, runs a company-data program with published indicative payouts of $100K to $5M. micro1 has said it pays $100K to $2M per midsize company and announced a $1 billion twelve-month spend commitment on this kind of data, with financing cited from Citi and Hercules Capital. Wind-down specialists such as SimpleClosure, plus training-data firms including Mercor, Surge AI and Turing, sit in adjacent parts of the same supply chain.
Who sits at the end of the pipe: Business Insider and follow-on coverage name OpenAI, AnthropicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Meta and Alphabet | Google among the model developers this market feeds. Specific lab-to-dataset contracts are rarely disclosed. The clearest public auction remains Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy estate, where Google bid about $10M, Mercor about $7.5M and micro1 about $12.5M for de-identified email, Teams and file archives (see Dealroom's Spirit noteDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →).
Geography and fit: Public programmes skew heavily to US English-language operators. Polyshares and Mode emphasise multi-year history on the same software stack and remote white-collar work where decisions leave a digital trail. Below roughly 30 to 50 employees, fixed diligence and legal costs often kill the deal.
The gaming turn: On Corey Ganim's Build With AI podcast, Lock said buyer demand rotates by industry and that video game companies had recently overtaken heavy construction as the hot category for operational archives. Separately, a parallel stack has emerged that licenses gameplay itself for world models and robotics: firms such as Origin LabDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, ZENOSDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, WorldmodeldataDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and ArtifactDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → sell rights-cleared, engine-level state and action trajectories rather than Slack or email.
The friction: Employees are often unpaid and uninformed. Emory law professor Ifeoma Ajunwa called the practice an ethical grey area around whether workplace consent extends to sale for model training. Gartner, cited by Business Insider, estimates annual AI data spend rising from under $1B in 2025 toward about $6.5B by 2027. Lock's claim that Polyshares tracked about $1M of revenue in its first month, and an average deal near $300K, comes from his podcast appearances and is self-reported, not independently audited.
Sources: Business Insider (13 Oct 2026), Business Insider on micro1's $1B bet (26 Oct 2026), Polyshares, Mode company-data programme, Corey Ganim on X, Build With AI podcast (YouTube).
Image credit: still from Corey Ganim / Build With AI podcast episode featuring Ryan Lock (X / @coreyganim)
