Sorted by system
Any of these can go in alone or alongside others. The choice is yours for each system.
Long-running conversations with customers, vendors and coworkers in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.
Documents and drives
Proposals, procedures, templates and reports saved on SharePoint, Google Drive or Dropbox.
Messaging
Channels and threads in Slack or Teams where day to day problems get worked out.
CRM
Salesforce, HubSpot or similar tools, with call notes, pipeline stages and account history.
Service tickets
Requests, replies and resolutions from your help desk or service inbox.
Project boards
Boards, tasks and status updates in tools such as Jira, Asana or Monday.
Finance systems and ERP
Orders, purchasing, inventory and invoice workflows from your ERP or accounting system.
Code
Repositories, pull requests and review comments, if your team builds software.
Why plain business records are useful
AI labs license business records to train and test models on how real work gets done. A model that has only read public web pages has seen very little of what happens inside a company.
Your records capture a sequence: a request arrives, a question gets asked, a document changes, a decision lands, a job closes. That chain is what has value. It does not need to be polished or organized.
A long history is a plus. So does a team large enough that many people wrote, replied and decided in the same systems.
Examples of a useful thread
- A customer asks for a quote. Stock gets checked, a colleague weighs in, a price is drafted and a follow up goes out a week later.
- A job runs late. Messages go back and forth, the schedule is updated and the customer hears what changed.
- A ticket is opened. Support gathers details, attempts a fix, escalates, then closes it with a note.
- A process gets written down. The draft is reviewed, fixed and saved as the way things are now done.
Who usually qualifies
- 20 or more employees. A team big enough to share the same systems.
- 3 or more years in business. A long enough record to show how work shifts over time.
- Records in business software. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, project tools, a CRM or an ERP.
What you can skip
There is no need for tidy data, a data team or one central system. You do not need to know today which systems you would include. Scoping comes later, and every choice made there belongs to you.
Records you would rather keep private can simply stay out. Before anything is shared, sensitive data still in scope is excluded or de-identified.
See what your records might be worth.
See my estimate