AI labs are fueling a wild market for your Slack DMs
AI labs are aggressively purchasing workplace data, including Slack messages and documents, to train large language models. This trend has created a lucrative but controversial market, raising significant concerns about employee privacy and corporate data security.
Why it matters
The commodification of internal workplace communications for AI training highlights a major ethical and legal frontier in the tech industry.
Tyler Le/BI As 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.
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