> I have a hunch what this is for. AI companies want to make bigger inroads into nontechnical work settings. But LLM progress outside of fields where verifiable rewards for RL post-training can be synthetically generated (coding, math) has been pretty flat. Buying years of operational data from a company like an airline could be used to reconstruct long-horizon task trajectories in areas like customer service or marketing.

This. Training data companies like Mercor are even creating simulated companies to create similar data, so they can better automate even more white collar work:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-...:

> The data-training start-ups see a lucrative opportunity in recreating workplaces in miniature: controlled environments in which their gig workers can evaluate and reproduce emails, memos and slide presentations in context. The information emerging from such a setup, the companies boast, will help shrink the gap between what A.I. models can accomplish and what office workers actually do from one minute to the next, as ideas and instructions flow between meetings, documents and applications.

> Scale, for example, has said that “our environments replicate real-world workflows,” and that its contractors “curate artifacts that capture the complexity, ambiguity and edge cases of real professional work.”

> Executives see the models’ shortcomings as a sign there’s more for them to do.

> “I often use Claude Cowork, right?” said Edwin Chen, the founder of Surge. “And even though Claude Cowork is incredibly smart, oftentimes it doesn’t quite understand the nuance of Slack. It doesn’t quite understand this ambiguous question I have. It doesn’t quite understand where to go and find this Google document.”

> According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Mr. Chen’s stake in Surge — and his vision for what it could become — makes him the 258th-richest person in the world.

> “I often think about us as essentially, like, the school for A.G.I.,” Mr. Chen said, referring to a prophesied level of A.I. that surpasses human intelligence. “A.I. comes to us, and A.I. learns to run the world.” He and his customers at the big A.I. labs, he said, are designing the curriculum.