Your email and Slack after the license: the path to a trained AI agent

1. 1

   Copy

   The buyer receives a copy, either through a direct connection (Mercor links to more than 100 apps) or an export your staff put together, such as micro1's data manifest.

2. 2

   Scrub

   Names, addresses, phone numbers and account details are deleted or replaced with codes. For the Spirit sale, Tonic.ai handles de-identification and certifies its work to the court.

3. 3

   Paraphrase, in some cases

   micro1 says it rewrites certain datasets synthetically, so the text no longer lines up one-to-one with your originals.

4. 4

   Build exercises

   A complaint thread turns into an exercise: given this complaint, fix it. Surge AI judges an archive by how many usable exercises it yields.

5. 5

   Train and score

   The exercises run inside a training environment that imitates real software. The agent tries each one and earns a reward when it gets it right.

6. 6

   Evaluate

   Agents are tested as well as trained. micro1 has a separate testing product called Cortex.

These are the places where a team's decisions get written down. One Slack channel records the question, the reply, the failure and the fix, which is the chain of reasoning an agent has to pick up.

They are also near-universal. Of the shutting-down startups SimpleClosure examined, 95% used Slack. Mercor's ads report Slack at 55% of its partner companies and Gmail at 50%.

Your licensed copy can be wiped; micro1's terms promise deletion within 120 days after final delivery. Those terms also state that models trained on the data stay as they are. The learning does not get erased.

Imagine the support channel of an IT services firm with 50 staff. The lab does not care which customer rang. It cares about the sequence: a printer stopped working, the technician gathered details, attempted a couple of fixes, then marked the ticket resolved. So put your energy into the scrubbing stage, not the training:

• Who strips personal details, and using which tool?
• Will we review scrubbed samples before release?
• Is there an independent sign-off, like the certificate filed in the Spirit case?
• Does the contract prohibit re-identifying anyone in the data?