{
  "id": 17361183,
  "title": "AI vendors are relearning the oldest rule in the data business",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/31/ai-vendors-are-relearning-the-oldest-rule-in-the-data-business",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-31T07:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "TechRadar",
    "slug": "techradar",
    "url": "https://www.techradar.com/pro/ai-vendors-are-relearning-the-oldest-rule-in-the-data-business"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Many software companies are learning the hard way that pooling data for AI features can be as problematic as it is beneficial. While catalog retailers in the 1990s relied on data cooperatives to combine transaction histories and share modeled prospects, software vendors now face similar challenges without clear guidelines. The issue lies in the fact that AI products often learn from data and, when on a multi-tenant platform, that learning can spill over to other customers. This means a company's data can improve the enrichment, lead scoring, and recommendations for thousands of other customers, but the contracts rarely address whether this trade is fair. Customers still own their data legally, but ownership alone does not determine who benefits. Recently, HubSpot attempted to pool enrichment data across customer accounts, but the move was met with resistance from sales and RevOps teams who valued the effort spent cleaning and enriching their own data. The company subsequently dropped the plan and opted for an opt-in approach. The problem stems from the fact that terms allowing such data pooling were updated long before most customers became aware, and the responsibility for explaining this data sharing often falls on product teams rather than ownership teams. As AI trust surveys reveal that only about 30% of organizations have mature AI strategies, procurement teams are now starting to ask critical questions about data pooling, such as whether data trains or enriches models used by other customers, whether participation is opt-in, and whether it can be switched off later without losing core features. These data pooling terms are expected to become as standard as security certifications, and vendors that address these concerns upfront will have a clearer path to renewal.",
  "summary": "Could software vendors use your hard-earned data to benefit your competitors?",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}