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PR Paul Roetzer Covers the AI news cycle in depth, from enterprise adoption and AI agents to layoffs, safety regulation, and where using AI as a writing aid ends and letting it...

“They're basically saying, sell us your data so we can replace your people. Now they're going to write all these essays saying that's not what happens. We don't replace people. You go to higher level cognitive creative stuff. It's all crap… This is data brokering to automate human labor industry by industry.”

The Artificial Intelligence Show · October 2026

“They're basically saying, sell us your data so we can replace your people. Now they're going to write all these essays saying that's not what happens. We don't replace people. You go to higher level cognitive creative stuff. It's all crap… This is data brokering to automate human labor industry by industry.” — Paul Roetzer, The Artificial Intelligence Show

Paul Roetzer reacting to an AI company's plan to spend $1 billion over 12 months buying companies' operating data. He explained that the data is used to train models to do the work of a specific kind of business, such as a dental office, and that failed startups often sell their Slack messages this way.

The Artificial Intelligence Show · 2026-10-20 Listen to the episode → More from Paul Roetzer →

Transcript

The Artificial Intelligence Show Around 1:14:19 into the episode
Speaker 4

…from founder and CEO Ali Ansari arguing that human data could ultimately become a trillion-dollar annual market as companies train AI to automate more work. Interestingly, in one of his essays, he also just wrote straight up: automation does not eliminate human work, it pushes humans towards higher

Mike Kaput

value, more creative work. So, Paul, this is an interesting one. Like, it seems like they are trying to buy company data to do what people at the company do.

Paul Roetzer

…How do the dentists make their decisions? How's the office manager function? What do they input into the software? What do the conversations with customers look like? And then you use that as reinforcement learning to make the model specialized in operating within a dental practice. Doing the same thing in consulting firms, marketing agencies, healthcare practices, like whatever, banks. And so, they're basically saying, Sell us your data so we can replace your people. Now they're going to write all these essays saying that's not what happens. We don't replace people. You go to higher level cognitive creative stuff. It's all crap. Like they're just buying data to replace the need to have people working in these companies. And there will be some jobs left, but like you're basically selling out humanity when you do this. Now, the way they often do it is they go buy like bankrupt companies or like tech startups is a common one. So you can go buy like Slack messages out of these tech startups that don't make it. And so…

Speaker 4

And probably not a surprise to plenty of our listeners, but my gosh, I feel like your average person. This is a whole shadow world they are unaware of.

Paul Roetzer

Yeah. And so like you might get sold out as a worker and not even know what happened. So like your CFO and your CEO might do a deal with a company like this. And now all of a sudden everything you've put into your Google Docs and your Slack messages and your meeting notes is all actually being sold…

Speaker 4

Damn. Yeah. Yeah. It's been going

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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