Today on Forbes, AI's new training data, your old work slacks and emails.

When Shanna Johnson was winding down CLO-24, the transcription and captioning company she ran as CEO, she discovered an unexpected asset.

It's operational exhaust, that is, the digital leftovers that

pile up across years of work and collaboration. To close the company out, she worked with

Simple Closure, a startup that specializes in helping companies wind down. Simple Closure helped her

through the usual shutdown paperwork, closing out payroll and taxes,

getting investor consents in order, and filing paperwork with the IRS. Then came the part nobody

puts in the founder playbook, selling off Cello 24's 13-year digital footprint. Every slack joke, every Jira ticket, emails documenting

internal victories or frustrations, sitting in employees' multi-terabyte Google drives,

selling all that off as training data for the next generation of AI. For that, CLE 24 received, quote, hundreds of thousands of dollars,

which Johnson said helped her go from, quote, I don't know how we are going to pay our bills,

to, quote, we can tie this up neatly with a bow and be able to walk away. She told Forbes, quote,

I'm still a bit emotional about shutting the company down,

but it's cool to think that our data could be useful, live on, and help other people.

It's a clean ending for a messy reality.

The company didn't survive, but its work trail did.

And in 2026, that trail can be worth real money.

Johnson's data sale isn't an isolated exit strategy.

It is a new frontier in the AI arms race.

AI labs started off by training their models on the public internet,

Reddit threads, Wikipedia entries, digitized books.

But they exhausted that, all of it, by late 2024, according to former OpenAI chief scientist

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