Sell or License Your Company Data: Use a Broker or Go Direct to AI?
AITrainingDataBroker.com
Sell or license your data:
broker
or go direct?
How to decide when an AI company asks to license your data
Jimmy Lin
Sell or license your data: broker or go direct?
An AI company emails you and says it wants to license your company's data. Do you reply yourself, or do you bring in a broker first?
It is a fair question, and in this video I will give you a plain way to decide.
To start, think about what a single offer really tells you.
The video
Full script
An AI company emails you and says it wants to license your company's data. Do you reply yourself, or do you bring in a broker first?
It is a fair question, and in this video I will give you a plain way to decide.
To start, think about what a single offer really tells you.
The trouble with a single offer is simple: when only one AI company is at the table, you learn what that company will pay, and nothing about what your data is worth to anyone else.
So the real choice is not broker or no broker, it is whether you will see more than one offer before you say yes.
Before we go further, let me tell you who I am.
I'm Jimmy. I have worked in data at Fortune 500 companies, as a data analyst, a data engineer and a software engineer, and I am trained in data science. I am also a Canadian military veteran, where I specialized in data analysis and reporting.
Are you selling your data? We are your broker and technical advisor. We get you the best price, and we guide your team through the technical side, so your data stays private.
Are you buying data for an AI lab? We find the right data for you and see it through to delivery, so you can focus on advancing AI research.
What does going direct mean? You answer that email yourself, so you talk to one AI company, you look at one offer, and you work out the terms on your own.
That can be fine when the offer is good and your team has time for it.
The catch is that you have nothing to compare the offer with, and every question, every term and the whole export land on your desk.
Price is the second problem, because there is no standard price list for this kind of data, and what AI companies pay can differ by 10 times or more depending on the data, the company and the deal, as Quartz reported this year.
That means when one AI company names a number, you can not tell whether it is a high price or a low one.
Business sales give us a useful comparison, and one study of them stands out.
That study, of private company sales, was published in the Quarterly Journal of Finance in 2023, and it found that sellers who hired an advisor got higher prices.
The authors point to competing bids as a main reason, because the more bidders a seller has, the stronger the seller's position.
Data licenses are a different market, so I can not promise the same result, but the logic is the same: more than one bidder gives you something to compare.
Here is how it can look. A 35-person packaging company gets an email from an AI company that wants to license 6 years of its customer service emails and order notes.
The owner asks for a few more offers before answering, and 2 more AI companies come back, one asking for exclusivity and one not.
Now the owner can see how the terms differ, which is hard to judge from one offer, and then the owner makes the final call.
To decide, ask yourself 3 questions, starting with whether you already have more than one offer in writing, because with several offers you can compare them yourself.
Second, does your team have the time to answer every question and handle the export, and third, do you know what your data is worth?
If you have several offers and the time, going direct can work, but if you answer no to any of them, a broker is worth a close look.
If you do bring in a broker, ask 3 things before you sign anything.
Ask how the broker is paid, and whether that happens only when a deal closes, because that tells you what the broker is working toward.
Ask who the broker works for, you or the AI company, and ask what happens if nothing closes, so that you know what it would cost you.
My answers to those 3 questions are simple, as your broker and technical advisor.
As your broker, I bring your data to several AI companies and AI labs so they bid against each other, I work through the terms with you, and you make the final call.
As your technical advisor, I guide your team through the export, and we strip out the customer names, the emails and the phone numbers before any AI company sees your data.
I am paid only when a deal closes, and nothing moves until your team signs off.
Whichever road you take, the data your team has built over the years is what AI companies want, and what matters most is that you see more than one offer before you decide.
If you run a company with 30 or more people, the data you already have could become a new revenue stream. You can find out if yours qualifies, for free, at AITrainingDataBroker.com.
If you have further questions, leave them in the comments, and I will answer them in the next video.
Thank you for watching, and I will see you next time.
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