AI labs are paying for your Slack DMs and work emails as training data

AI companies are paying businesses large sums for their employees' private Slack messages, emails and documents, and most workers have no idea it is happening. A Business Insider investigation published 13 October found a fast-growing market where data brokers hunt for small businesses, buy their internal records, and resell them to AI giants building the next generation of workplace tools.

What is going on

OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others are racing to build AI agents (AI that completes a task with several steps for you, not just one answer) that can handle white-collar work. To do that, they need examples of how real people actually work: the messages they send, the documents they write, the decisions they make. Public web data is no longer enough.

That has created a market for workplace data. Brokers approach small and medium businesses, buy their internal records, strip out obvious personal details such as Social Security numbers and home addresses, and sell the cleaned data to AI companies by the terabyte.

"Right now, the demand is just astronomical," said Dan Novaes, CEO of Mode.Inc, a startup that sells data to AI model developers.

Why it is happening now

Annual spending on data for AI training is projected to grow from less than $1 billion last year to almost $6.5 billion in 2027, according to Gartner estimates cited in the Business Insider report. That kind of money is pulling in a new class of data broker.

Ryan Lock, cofounder of AI broker Polyshares, compares the moment to the Texas oil boom of the early 1900s, when prospectors bought cheap land from farmers who did not know oil was underneath it. "The offers being made look almost identical to those early oil offers," he told Business Insider. "They'll say, 'I'm offering you double market. I need an answer by Friday.'"

Brokers now use 48-hour deadlines as a standard tactic to stop business owners from thinking too hard or seeking legal advice.

What it looks like at work

• Business owners are receiving six-figure "exploding offers" that expire in 48 hours for their company data.
• Instagram is reportedly flooded with ads promising millions in exchange for workplace data.
• Doug Kreuzkamp, who runs airline operations company Springshot, told Business Insider he had "less than 48 hours' notice, from the media" that Google had bought data his company had spent 15 years building, after Springshot's client Spirit Airlines went bankrupt.
• Meta's attempt to harvest its own employees' data for its AI models reportedly sparked an internal revolt.
• Suspected hackers have also tried to sell stolen company codebases for millions of dollars, showing the same demand is attracting criminal activity.

The catch

Employees almost never profit from or even know about their messages and documents being sold. Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Emory University, told Business Insider that the lack of federal privacy laws in the United States leaves few legal barriers to companies collecting employee data and selling it. "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," she said. She added that the industry risks a reckoning with workers and regulators.

What to do now

1. Ask your HR or legal team whether your company has sold or licensed employee data to any third party for AI training.
2. Check your employment contract and any data or privacy policies you signed. Look for clauses about how your work communications can be used.
3. If you manage a team, raise the question with leadership before any data deal is signed. Employees affected by such a sale are rarely consulted.
4. If your company uses Slack, check whether your workspace admin has enabled any third-party data-sharing integrations. Slack's own privacy settings let admins export messages in some plan types.

The rules here are still being written, so the best protection right now is knowing the question exists.