Can a SaaS Company Sell or License Its Data to AI?
AITrainingDataBroker.com
Can a SaaS
company license
its data to AI?
Support tickets, postmortems, renewal threads and feature requests: what AI companies may want, and what is never shared.
Jimmy Lin
Can a SaaS company license its data to AI?
If you run a SaaS company, your help desk holds years of customer problems, and next to each one sits the fix your team worked out.
In this video, I will follow one bad morning at a software company, show what AI companies may want from it, and explain what is never shared, starting with what one of the largest software companies did with its own outage reports.
The video
Full script
If you run a SaaS company, your help desk holds years of customer problems, and next to each one sits the fix your team worked out.
In this video, I will follow one bad morning at a software company, show what AI companies may want from it, and explain what is never shared, starting with what one of the largest software companies did with its own outage reports.
That company is Microsoft: in 2023, its researchers tested AI on more than 40,000 incident reports from over 1,000 of its cloud services.
They found that training the AI on those reports made it significantly better at suggesting what caused each problem and how to fix it.
Most SaaS companies write the same kind of report every time something breaks, so the question is what your own reports are worth.
Before we look at yours, 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.
So, let us follow one bad morning at a SaaS company, which means a company that sells software people use online, by subscription.
At 9:02, an alert fires because logins are failing, and by 9:15, 87 tickets have come in from customers who can not get to work.
At 10:40, engineering ships a fix, and 2 days later, the team writes a postmortem that explains what broke and why.
Then, a month later, a large customer brings it up on the renewal call, so that one morning has left data in your help desk, your chat, your postmortems and your customer emails.
Now, take one of those 87 tickets. It starts with the problem in the customer's words, which are often vague, upset and only half right.
Then come the steps your agent tried, like the questions they asked, the checks they ran and the hand-off to engineering when it got hard.
And at the end, there is what finally worked, written down, so a solved ticket is a lesson with the answer included, which is exactly what an AI company can learn from.
Why would an AI company want your tickets? Because real support conversations that follow a company's rules are hard to find.
In 2021, a research team built a set of 10,042 support conversations, and to get them, they had to train people to play the agent and follow a written rule book.
Your help desk holds the real version, with real customers, real rules and years of it.
Tickets are only part of it. Your postmortems explain what broke, why it broke and how the team fixed it, much like the reports in that Microsoft study.
Feature requests show what customers asked for, and renewal and cancel threads show why customers stayed or why they left.
And your onboarding emails show where new users get stuck, so together, these files show how a software business really runs.
Now, which of this can a SaaS company license? Your help docs, internal notes and postmortems were written by your team, so they are usually yours.
Tickets and chats can be licensed once the customer details are removed, but some customer contracts ban any reuse, so we check your contracts first and leave those customers out.
And the data your customers store inside your product, like their invoices or their patient lists, belongs to them, so it is never shared.
This is not legal advice, so ask your own lawyer.
Before any AI company sees a ticket, we de-identify your data, which means we strip out the customer names, the users' names, the email addresses and anything secret.
For example, Marta Klein becomes User 22, and Halvorsen Freight becomes Customer 9 in every ticket, chat and email.
Tickets also hold things like passwords and API keys, the secret codes that connect one system to another, so we remove those too, and the problem and the fix stay.
And because it is a license, not a sale, you keep your data and keep using it.
Of course, some SaaS companies have more to offer than others, so which data counts the most?
Tickets count when the fix is written down, and they count more when you have 3 years or more in one help desk and the escalations to engineering are kept.
A postmortem for every outage helps, and so do tickets you can link to renewals, because that shows which problems cost you customers.
And it helps to have 30 or more people at the company, because a bigger team writes more of this down.
How does a SaaS company get from a help desk full of tickets to a signed license? That is my job, as your broker and technical advisor.
As your broker, I bring your data to several AI companies and AI labs so they compete for it, and I work through the terms with you, and you make the final call.
On your side, the main job is exporting the tickets and postmortems, and as your technical advisor, I guide your team through it, help remove the secrets and make sure we de-identify your data before any AI company sees it.
Nothing moves until your team signs off, and I am paid only when a license is signed, so if there is no license, there is no fee.
So, could your worst days, the outages and the angry tickets, pay off as data? Now you know which files to look for.
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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