Updated October 2026
What business records AI companies want
You are wondering whether your kind of records is even the right kind. If they show your people doing real work step by step, it probably is. Buyers say they look for work that employees repeat in a well defined way, and some buy company archives to train AI tools that carry out tasks. Everyday emails, tickets and job notes show a model what public websites never did.1,2
Why now
Why labs want an ordinary business's records
AI models have read the public internet, which shows finished work, not the steps behind it. What is missing is how work gets done inside companies: how a dispatcher reshuffles loads when a truck breaks down, how an office manager chases an unpaid invoice, how a tech writes up a job. micro1's summer ad put it plainly, saying the next generation of AI models will be trained on real-world business workflows.3
The newest AI tools do tasks rather than answer questions, and they need realistic practice. MIT Technology Review reported that Surge AI buys company archives for exactly this, and Mercor bought Deeptune to build practice settings for these tools.2,4
The kinds they name
What buyers ask for most
Conversations come first: email, Slack and Teams. Then procedures, such as SOPs, playbooks, manuals and wikis. Then the records of the work itself, such as tickets, work orders, quotes, invoices and dispatch logs.5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12
The ads get specific by trade, naming call recordings and CAD files, dispatch logs and load histories, real estate deal files, media plans and design files, work orders and inspection records.12,13,14,15,16
| Fact | Value and source |
|---|---|
| Data micro1 names on its partnership page | Internal docs, SOPs and playbooks, knowledge bases, project management workflows, internal comms, templates, CRM and workflow metadata, task histories |
| What Mode buys | Email and calendar, documents, chat, calls and transcripts, CRM and billing records, from Gmail, Outlook, Drive, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Notion, Zoom, QuickBooks, ServiceTitan and more |
| What Grepped buys | Messages, codebases, documents, business records and task histories, from Slack, Teams, Gmail, Outlook, GitHub, Jira, Google Drive, SharePoint, Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, QuickBooks, Xero, Zendesk, Asana and ServiceNow |
| Data it buys | Slack, email, Drive, CRM, tickets, design files, calls and ERP |
What they do not want
What they are not after
Customer identities and private details are removed, not prized. One buyer's ad says "AI labs aren't after your clients or your secrets", Spirit Airlines' archive was offered with passenger records excluded, and sensitive employee and health records are usually left out.17,18,19
Raw numbers alone are weak. A spreadsheet of sales totals shows results, not how they were achieved, and the useful record is the one that explains the work around the number. If your records look like that, our quiz asks which systems you use and introduces you to the buyers we work with that take them.
FAQ
Questions, answered with sources
Every business is different, so this one is best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over it with you before anything is signed.
Before you sign
Questions to talk through with your buyer
Every business is different, so these are best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over them with you before anything is signed.
Questions for this kind of business
- Do customer, vendor or platform contracts, NDAs or API terms restrict this?
- Could the data include privileged material or trade secrets?
Questions for any buyer
- Is the license exclusive, and for how long?
- Can you sublicense the data, and to whom?
- Which AI labs will receive it, and will you tell us?
- How long do you keep it, and how is it deleted?
- What is your liability cap, and who indemnifies whom?
- Will the contract ban re-identification of people in the data?
- Who removes personal data, by what method, and do we approve it first?