Someone Wants to Buy Your Old Emails

I've been watching something grow for a few weeks now. Statements of work, contracts, process docs and years of email are suddenly getting attention from companies building AI models.

It's the everyday record of how an agency communicates, and that record is now showing up in offers to Bureau members and to The Bureau itself. We've got over a million Slack messages and evidently they're now seen as the perfect nutrition for building smarter AI models. Some members have been offered up to $500,000.

I get why saying yes is tempting. If you've had a rough stretch, an unexpected check could cover a few payrolls, buy you some breathing room and give you time to figure out what's next. But what are we really selling? Even anonymized, why are they offering so much? More down below, fearless reader!

What To Sell and What To Protect

Forbes recently reported on companies selling their old Slack messages, emails and project records to help train AI. One company pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars while it was shutting down. I understand why buyers want this. These records show how people really work: how they make decisions, solve problems, coordinate with each other and recover when something goes sideways. And most of all, how they communicate.

That's also where it gets complicated for me, because those records are full of people. There's the client who trusted you with a problem before they had words for it, the employee who asked something they'd have been embarrassed to ask anywhere else, and the team working through a mistake before they knew how to fix it. Every one of those conversations happened with an understanding of who was in the room. I'm not sure they would have gone the same way if everyone knew they might be sold someday. Even with those of us who would anonymize the info, there are some who won't.

Bloomberg's reporting on Google's bid for Spirit Airlines' business records gets right into this. There's money on the table and there are promises to strip out identifying details, while the people whose work fills those records are asking what say they have in how it gets used.

That hits close to home when you run a community. People come to The Bureau to ask for help. Sometimes they're excited, sometimes they're struggling, and sometimes they need to say something they can't say to their team, their clients or their business partner. Having a place for those conversations is a big part of why The Bureau matters.

So when an offer shows up, I think we have to look past the number. What do we have permission to share? Who else helped create the thing we're being paid for? What could someone learn from it, even with the names removed? How would the people involved feel if we walked them through the deal?

To me that's the real test. Could I look someone in the eye and tell them what was sold, who has it now and what they can do with it?

There may be things a business can license with a clear conscience, like material made for that purpose or work where everyone involved understands and agrees to how it will be used. But deciding what's for sale also means deciding what isn't.

That's a lot easier to do before an offer arrives and the dollar amount starts doing the thinking for you. Especially in financially challenging times.

We've spent almost 15 years building this community. Along the way we forged the kind of relationships that let us do good work, ask honest questions and get help when we need it. Those belong in the calculation too.

If someone offered you a million bucks for the history of how your business works, I'd love to hear what you would sell and what you would protect. Let me know!