The lawsuits this week are about data that was taken. Your intro is data that's asked for.

What the lawsuits are really telling you

Read this week's news as a buyer would. Bloomberg Law reported that OpenAI was sued in San Francisco federal court over claims that ChatGPT took sensitive data from millions of child users without parental consent and used it to train its models. OpenAI strongly disagrees with the suit. The same week, Bloomberg Law reported that a judge questioned whether callers to company support lines had agreed to have their calls recorded and shared, in a case claiming Google used those calls to train an AI tool.

Then People Matters Global reported that Meta removed a clause from its commercial terms on October 17, after legal experts said it could be read as letting Meta train on website content beyond what owners had allowed. Meta says nothing changed in how it crawls the web.

Three different companies. One question each time: did the people behind the data say yes? Whoever wins these cases, the labs learn the same lesson. Data taken quietly can turn into a court case years later. Data someone agreed to license has a signature behind it. We hear that from buyers more and more, and it shapes what they will pay for.

Why consent is the asset you're bringing

Labs can't get real business records by scraping. Team chats, support threads, sales emails and call transcripts sit inside companies, and the only way in is the owner's agreement. So when you make an intro, the owner's yes is exactly what the lab is paying for.

Here is how it works with us. The owner licenses a copy of past records and keeps ownership. Buyers never touch live systems. Names, companies and emails come out of what buyers see, and health and payment records stay out. Nothing is shared until the owner approves the terms in writing. That is a clean chain from owner to lab, which is exactly what this week's defendants are being asked to show.

One honest caution, and the Google case shows why. A business can own its records and still need to check what its customers and staff agreed to. Support call recordings are a good example. Before anything moves, someone has to answer the rights question. We do that with the owner, and our guide on whether you own the records you want to license is a good one to send ahead.

Which clients fit

The best fits are ordinary businesses with years of real work written down. Think of a services firm with a busy Slack or Teams workspace, an agency with long client email threads, a support team with a full ticket history, or a sales team with call notes and a CRM nobody ever cleaned. Companies winding down or preparing to sell often fit too, because the history is still there and the owner is already thinking about what the business is worth.

What matters is records that show how work actually gets done: the question, the back and forth, the fix. Deals we see typically run $200K to $2M. The data value calculator gives an owner a rough number before anyone gets on a call.

What owners ask, and how to raise it

Owners ask the same things every time. Do I lose my records? Will my clients' names get out? Is this even legal? Who is on the other side? Answer plainly: they keep ownership, private details come out, nothing is shared without their written yes, and the first step is just a description of what they have. No files, no logins.

The news makes the first sentence easy. Something like: "You've seen AI companies getting sued for using data without asking. They are now paying businesses that agree to license theirs. Want to find out if yours qualifies?" Owners hear that differently from a cold pitch, because it starts with them being in control.

Watch who else is pitching your clients

More people want in. On X, Colin Gardiner wrote that he keeps seeing companies pivot into selling data to AI labs, and called it a crowded trade. That is one person's view, but it matches what owners tell us: they are getting pitched by brokers and aggregators who buy records cheap and resell them.

Here is the bad practice to name. A middleman who buys an owner's data outright and resells it is paid on the gap between the two prices. The owner's low price is that middleman's profit. We work the other way. We represent the seller and are paid when the seller is paid, so a better deal for your client is a better deal for us. Payment can land as fast as 7 days, with net 30 usual. Tell your clients to ask anyone who pitches them one question: who do you work for?

How you win this week

The headlines give you a reason to call. Pick three clients with years of written work history, use the news as your opener, and offer them a description-only first step. Nothing gets handed over at that stage. The owner simply learns that the data labs want most is the kind they say yes to.

Everything you need for that first call, including the questions owners ask and how to answer them, is in the partner kit. If you're new to this, start with becoming a partner and we'll be your direct line to the labs.