AI labs are fueling a wild market for your Slack DMs

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.

Annual spending on data for AI is projected to explode from less than $1 billion last year to almost $6.5 billion in 2027, Gartner estimates.

The boom has a darker side.

Employees rarely profit from — or know about — their Slacks, PowerPoints, and Google Docs being sold to the highest bidder.

Suspected hackers have shopped around a large company's stolen codebase for millions of dollars.

Meta's attempt to harvest its own employees' data for its AI models sparked a revolt .

This story is part of a series called The AI Data Grab , an inside look at how tech giants are increasingly turning to workers, users, and the physical world to get data to train AI.