Startups are buying archived workplace messages and support tickets and treating them as valuable training and operational data.
The Information reported the sudden demand centers on old Slack threads and IT tickets, which buyers say provide realistic dialogue, traceable fixes and event timelines useful for training AI and reconstructing product histories.
A small secondary market has formed to harvest shutdown and exit assets, code, email archives, and ticket backlogs, and sellers are pricing records by their "data richness," with items linked to code commits or clear outcomes commanding higher fees.
That shift rests on two converging changes: enterprise support has moved into chat and ticket systems so conversation artifacts now contain operational context, and AI tooling increasingly needs real-world sequences of problem, triage and resolution to learn useful behaviors.
The trend is also reshaping how teams think about knowledge retention and handoff, because searchable conversation history can shorten response times for recurring issues and make legacy decisions discoverable; vendors and buyers alike are repositioning archival data as intellectual property rather than throwaway chatter.
For companies holding long ticket backlogs, the market creates a new liquid option for dormant assets and a fresh demand signal for cleaner, better-indexed internal records.
