AI Brokers Pay Up to $2 Million for Employees' Slack Messages and Emails

Businesses can now fetch between $100,000 and $2 million for the data their employees generate every day — Slack messages, CRM records, email histories — as AI data brokers flood owners with six-figure offers, according to a new report from Business Insider.

The market has turned aggressive. Brokers, working with OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, have exhausted the trove of data from defunct companies and are now chasing live data from active businesses, as Business Insider reported. Owners describe being inundated with six-figure offers laced with hard-sell tactics.

The Palo Alto, California-based startup Micro1 runs a data partnerships program that pays companies anywhere from $100,000 to $2 million for their operational data. It's also offering an unlimited $50,000 referral bonus for any company approved into the program.

"Right now, the demand is just astronomical," Dan Novaes, CEO of Mode.Inc, told Business Insider. "People need to wake up to it and take this opportunity."

What makes workplace data worth millions?

The prize asset is what William Almeida, chief revenue officer of Micro1, calls "long-horizon" data — records that demonstrate how work actually gets done over time.

Pricing follows volume. Data is priced by the terabyte, and companies with more white-collar employees hold a more valuable corpus to sell, as Novaes told Business Insider.

There are catches. If a company won't sell everything — Slack messages, CRM records, email history together — the rest of its data loses value. Exclusivity and the company's field of expertise also move the price.

In short: the more complete the record of daily work, the bigger the check.

Is this a new form of workplace surveillance?

Selling comes with downsides. Workplace surveillance already extends beyond keyboard tracking and email monitoring. Earlier this month, a longtime remote employee in New Jersey sued her former employer after she refused webcam monitoring that would have photographed her every three minutes.

Employees can revolt even when the buyer is their own employer. Meta suspended a program earlier this year that would have collected employee data on keystrokes and mouse movements to train AI models to automate white-collar work, after an internal uprising — as Business Insider reported in September.

Sensitive information such as Social Security numbers and home addresses is scrubbed before data reaches AI companies. But the scrubbing can fail. In the canceled Meta program, supposedly anonymized data like private conversations and performance records became visible through an internal leak, as Business Insider previously reported.

The stakes reached Congress after the abrupt shutdown of Spirit Airlines earlier this year. Google emerged as the highest bidder in Spirit's bankruptcy proceedings, offering $10 million for the airline's entire dataset — internal communications, spreadsheets, calendars, transactions, frequent flyer info and more. Last week, 119 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, signed a letter co-written by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts urging Google and Spirit to protect the privacy of former Spirit employees.

Does employee consent cover selling their data?

Many employees don't know their workplace interactions are up for grabs — or that there's big money in them.

There's no federal backstop. No federal privacy laws currently prevent companies from collecting employee data for AI training, Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Emory University, told Business Insider.

"The question is, does the consent of the employees from whom they collected that data actually extend to the sale of the data?" Ajunwa asked. "I think it's an ethically gray area."

Employees rarely profit from — or even learn about — the monetization of their data, a gap that could spark pushback as the market scales. With demand what Novaes calls astronomical and no federal privacy law in the way, the question isn't whether workplace data gets sold, but whether employees find out before the checks clear.

By Grace Kim