What company data AI buyers want: November 2026

As of November 1, 2026, accounting and finance is the industry AI data buyers name most often: 9 of the 17 programs in our buyer index. Healthcare and software follow with 8 each, then manufacturing with 7 and legal with 6. The records buyers ask for most are the ones almost every company keeps: CRM and sales history, support tickets, email and chat, internal documentation and accounting records. Code and CAD files are named by fewer programs, but by buyers that specialize in them. Published ranges run from $10K at the low end of Scale's to $5M at the top of Mode's.

This is our monthly map of that demand. It counts what each program says on its own pages, as recorded in our index (last checked October 29, 2026) and Mercor's listings (checked October 31), and adds what we're hearing directly from buyers.

Which industries do AI data buyers name most?

Accounting and finance, healthcare, and software are the industries named by the most AI data-buyer programs this month. Seven of the 17 programs don't limit or rank companies by industry, so a low count doesn't rule an industry out.

Labelbox Prism is the one program that publishes how urgently it wants each industry. It labels software and internet "urgent", the only industry with that label. Financial services, healthcare and life sciences, and manufacturing, logistics and telecom are "high demand". Retail, consumer and hospitality, and public sector and education are "steady".

Mode sets lower minimum headcounts for legal, medical, accounting and finance firms than for other businesses, so a small practice in one of those fields fits Mode where a company of the same size in another field doesn't.

Which types of firms are buyers asking for?

Mercor publishes the most specific answer: 25 listings. Twenty-four describe a type of firm, the records it should hold and the history it needs; the twenty-fifth asks for chemistry and materials science R&D records. Grouped, the firm types are:

• Professional firms: law firms, accounting and tax firms, investment firms, hedge funds and quant firms, consulting and advisory firms.
• Healthcare: medical practices and health systems, imaging and diagnostics centers, digital health companies.
• Technical and industrial: software companies, SaaS companies, cybersecurity companies, AI product companies, hardware engineering, semiconductor and materials companies, manufacturers, construction companies, life sciences labs.
• Creative and media: design and web agencies, game studios, publishers, video production studios, consumer brands and photo studios.
• Operations: call centers, payments and fintech companies.

Most listings ask for history measured in the firm's own terms: closed matters for a law firm, filing seasons for an accounting firm, completed projects with full closeout for a construction company, years of commits for a software company.

Which records are buyers asking for?

The records named by the most programs are the everyday systems of a working company. The table counts the programs whose descriptions name each kind of record, or a tool that holds it (Salesforce for CRM, Confluence or Notion for documentation).

Labelbox Prism asks for "6+ months of multi-channel support logs with resolution tags". Collinear lists pull requests with the tickets behind them as something that raises the price. Our view: in both cases the buyer is paying for the record of how the work got done.

What the deals are worth, by type of firm

Mercor is the only buyer that publishes a range for each type of firm. Here is a selection of its 25 listings, checked October 31, 2026, with what the company earns:

Other programs publish one range for all companies. Mode's is $100K to $5M and Handshake's is $100K to $4M+. Replay ties its range to headcount: $10K to $100K at 20 to 50 staff, $100K to $1M at 50 to 250, and $1M+ above 250, plus a revenue share. These are the buyers' own published ranges, not quotes, and where a company lands depends on its records.

What buyers are telling us is hot

Our view: published criteria lag behind what buyers are chasing. In our conversations with buyers this fall, these came up as most wanted:

• CAD files.
• Codebases from before AI coding tools, roughly 2010 to 2023, written by people.
• Science and engineering records: materials science, chemistry, pharma, energy storage, semiconductors, robotics, aerospace, and civil and structural engineering.
• Accounting and legal records, which also interest buyers serving hedge funds as alternative data.
• Video of field work, paid per worker per month, on a recurring basis.
• Offline and trade businesses such as HVAC and other trades, which one buyer told us are under-represented.

One buyer told us marketing agencies and coaching businesses are oversupplied, and another told us screen recordings of computer work are no longer a focus, although SuperAnnotate still asks for them.

Why CAD is in demand and crowded

CAD and technical drawings are named by fewer programs than CRM or email, and some buyers are built around them. The General Data Company focuses on industrial records, including CAD models, technical drawings and commissioning records, and Mercor has separate listings for manufacturers, hardware engineering companies and construction companies.

Supply is arriving too, if one buyer's inbox is a guide. Ryan Lock, a managing partner at PolyShares, wrote on X on October 30 that his team had received more than 150 inbound CAD data opportunities in 48 hours. He compared two of them. One offered 300,000 mixed CAD files with no samples. The other came from an industrial architecture firm with 15 years of work: 300 projects and 220,000 files, counted by format (.dwg, .step, SolidWorks parts and PDF drawings), with three full projects on hand as samples. The second got the offer. The first, he wrote, "wasn't even considered", though it "could contain some of the most interesting files" for the project.

Our view: when a buyer has more opportunities than it can review, the owner who has already counted projects, counted files by format and set aside complete samples gets looked at first. The engineering and manufacturing post covers what CAD buyers ask for and what to keep out.

What this means for an owner

Our view: an owner in accounting, healthcare, software, manufacturing or legal has the widest choice of programs this month, but industry matters less than the records themselves. A company of any industry with years of CRM history, resolved support tickets, email and its accounting system fits most of the programs in this table.

Before talking to any buyer:

1. List your systems and how many years each one covers. Buyers price by system and by years of history.
2. Count what's in them in the buyer's terms: projects, closed matters, filing seasons, tickets, commits.
3. Set aside two or three complete examples you own outright and could show as samples.
4. Separate what the company owns from what it holds for clients. Several programs exclude records you don't have the right to license.

Check which programs your company fits (two minutes), or read how to sell or license your company's data for the steps from first call to payment.

We're an independent advisory firm. We track every program in this post, help owners compare their terms, and prepare the records before any buyer sees them. Nothing is shared until the owner approves a specific buyer, and owners can apply to any program directly. Participating buyers may pay us referral fees, and we say which before any introduction.