How to sell Slack and Teams chat data for AI training

Slack and Teams archives record how a company actually works: requests, handoffs, approvals, arguments and fixes, in order and with timestamps. MIT Technology Review reported in October 2026 that Surge AI looks for company archives covering situations from "disagreements to tricky judgment calls" and uses purchased data to build reinforcement learning gyms where AI agents practice real tasks.

Who buys Slack and Teams data for AI training?

Slack and Teams data is bought by training-data companies, direct buyers and brokers that supply AI labs building agents and workplace assistants. Each publishes different terms.

Our profiles of Mercor and Polyshares set out the rest of their published terms, including exclusivity, which changes what a chat archive is worth to you over time.

How much is Slack and Teams data worth?

Slack and Teams data has no published price per message, channel or workspace. The public figures are whole-archive deals, and they span a very wide range.

• About $15,000, pending at the time of reporting, for a closed crypto startup's workspace data in Google, Notion, Figma and Slack (MIT Technology Review, October 2026)
• $10,000 to $100,000 per company as the typical payment for closed startups' code and data (Fortune, September 2026, citing SimpleClosure)
• $10 million winning bid by Google for Spirit Airlines' archive of about 100 million emails and 500 million Teams messages (MIT Technology Review, October 2026)

Spirit is an outlier: a large airline with years of records sold in a bankruptcy auction, and The Next Web reported on October 9, 2026 that the sale still needed court approval. For operating companies with 30 or more staff, micro1's published payouts across all operational records start at $100,000 to $500,000. Our guide to what your data is worth explains the other price factors.

What makes a chat archive more valuable?

A chat archive is more valuable when threads run from request to outcome and the channels hold real work rather than social chatter or bot alerts.

Buyers turn these threads into agent tasks and evaluation sets. Our page on workplace communications data shows what AI teams check when they receive an archive like yours.

How do you export Slack data?

You export Slack data with Slack's own export tool, and Slack's help center says what you can export depends on your plan.

Slack exports contain links to files rather than the files themselves. Download any attachments you plan to license while the links still work, and map each file to its message in your manifest.

Be careful with connectors. Slack's API Terms, effective October 10, 2025, say developers may not "use API Data to train a large language model" or bulk export Slack message and file data except where an additional agreement allows it. If a buyer proposes reading your workspace through an app, ask how that fits those terms. Frankfurt Kurnit Klein and Selz also advises sellers not to give buyer tools direct access to company systems.

You export Microsoft Teams data through Microsoft Purview eDiscovery. Microsoft's training material says it can thread Teams conversations into HTML transcripts and export mailbox content as PST or MSG files.

Teams meeting recordings are stored separately. Microsoft says recordings save to the organizer's OneDrive Recordings folder, and channel meeting recordings to the team's SharePoint site. Our guide to selling meeting recordings covers the extra consent rules for audio and video.

What rights issues come with workplace chat?

Workplace chat carries rights that belong to people other than your company, starting with your employees and the other companies you talk to.

• Employees: Daniel Goldberg of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein and Selz notes that messages about pay, scheduling and working conditions may be protected concerted activity under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, whether or not staff are unionized
• Privacy promises: FTC staff wrote on February 13, 2024 that adopting more permissive data practices through a quiet, retroactive change to terms or a privacy policy may be unfair or deceptive
• State privacy law: Goldberg notes that under the CCPA a paid transfer of personal information counts as a sale unless it meets the statute's de-identification standard
• Shared channels: Slack Connect and Teams shared channels hold other companies' messages, often covered by NDAs
• HR, legal and executive channels: suppliers interviewed by MIT Technology Review leave HR records out

Goldberg also warns that data used to train a model cannot practically be pulled back out. We are a broker, not a law firm, so take independent employment and privacy advice. Our guide to whether you can legally sell company data sets out the general position.

How do you de-identify Slack and Teams messages?

De-identifying Slack and Teams messages means replacing user IDs consistently, then scrubbing the free text, where most identifiers hide.

• Replace user IDs and display names with stable pseudonyms, so each person keeps one ID across channels
• Rewrite @mentions, email addresses, phone numbers and signatures inside message text
• Drop profile fields such as job titles, time zones and photos
• Remove customer names, account numbers and deal values from client channels
• Check attachments and pasted screenshots, which text redaction misses

Our vetting standard requires a documented method and a re-identification test on a sample before any buyer sees your data. The de-identification guide covers the techniques.

If you hold UK or EU data

Messages written by staff in the UK or EU are personal data under UK GDPR and EU GDPR, and pseudonymized messages remain personal data. The European Data Protection Board said in Opinion 28/2024, adopted December 18, 2024, that AI models trained with personal data "cannot, in all cases, be considered anonymous", so expect buyers to ask exactly how you anonymized the archive.

How do you sell chat data step by step?

1. 1

   Map the workspaces

   List each Slack workspace and Teams tenant with its plan, years covered, channel count and which channels are shared with other companies.

2. 2

   Choose the channels

   Keep project, incident, deal and support channels. Leave out HR, legal, social and bot channels.

3. 3

   Check the rights

   Read the employee privacy notice in force when messages were written, client NDAs and the terms of any shared channel.

4. 4

   Export a fixed copy

   Use the native export, download the linked files and record a hash of what you exported.

5. 5

   De-identify and test

   Pseudonymize users, scrub message text and attachments, then run a re-identification test on a random sample.

6. 6

   Write the manifest

   Record channels, message counts, date ranges and exclusions. See how to build a data manifest.

7. 7

   Share a sample, then license

   Buyers you approve see a redacted sample under a mutual NDA, and you sign the license directly with the buyer you choose.

To find out which buyers would want your workspace and what range to expect, request a free data valuation. Sellers pay nothing to be assessed.