Why AI Companies Are Hunting for Data Nobody Else Has

The first question you would probably ask if I told you that Google bought Spirit Airlines’ data at auction, including internal emails, documents, booking information, and other corporate data, is whether Google would use it to improve Google Flights (Google’s flight booking tool) or start its own airliner. The answer, is no. As far as I’m aware, Google is not planning to launch Google Airlines anytime soon. Instead, the data provides Google with a large corpus of real, internal, corporate communication. LLMs have already been trained on countless “business communication” articles, management books, and email templates. The harder data to find is a complete record of the communications between employees of a company over time and the decisions that were enacted because of them. When someone asks AI for help drafting an email, a model trained on this Spirit Airlines data could provide outputs that better consider second order effects: how particular phrases are interpreted by others,…