AI companies are desperate for your work-related data. What's your price?

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AI is running into a data dilemma, and it needs your help.

Technically, it doesn't need your help.

It just needs your emails, your internal messages with coworkers, and any documents you created.

Consider this the newest stage of the great education of AI.

AI companies have run the well dry training their models with internet text and people rating their chatbot responses.

Now they want AI to get hands-on job experience, and they're doing it with simulated workplaces. (Alistair Barr, author of the great Tech Memo newsletter , has a fantastic breakdown on how these reinforcement learning environments work .) These training grounds need real data and workflows that models can study.

AI companies can leverage their own workforces for that.

Elon Musk recently told SpaceX workers their data will be used to train Grok.

"It will inherit your thoughts and ideas," is a totally normal thing Musk said at a recent all-hands meeting .

But some employees don't take kindly to their mouse movements and keystrokes being used for AI training. ( See: Meta .) Which brings us to Google.

The tech giant just paid $10 million for corporate data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines .

And it wasn't alone.