The industry has already exhausted the public web data used to train foundational AI models, a point underscored by the phrase "we've already run out of data." The next leap in AI capability and business value will come from harnessing the vast, proprietary data currently locked behind corporate firewalls.

Recognizing developers now work within AI tools, Stack Overflow is becoming a "headless" data source. Instead of being just a destination site, it monetizes its trusted knowledge base via enterprise APIs and data licensing, meeting users in their existing workflows like code editors.

Contrary to popular belief, advertising is the smallest part of Stack Overflow's business (20% of revenue). The company's financial stability comes from its enterprise SaaS product for internal knowledge management and a burgeoning data licensing business selling its curated Q&A data to AI labs.

The OpenAI-Disney partnership establishes a clear commercial value for intellectual property in the AI space. This sets a powerful legal precedent for ongoing lawsuits (like NYT v. OpenAI), compelling all other LLM developers to license content rather than scrape it for free, formalizing the market.

Instead of exclusive, all-encompassing deals, media conglomerates like Disney should strategically license separate parts of their IP portfolio (e.g., Pixar to Google, Marvel to Anthropic). This creates a competitive market among LLM providers, driving up the value of the IP and maximizing licensing revenue.

Data is becoming more expensive not from scarcity, but because the work has evolved. Simple labeling is over. Costs are now driven by the need for pricey domain experts for specialized data preparation and creative teams to build complex, synthetic environments for training agents.

AI models are becoming commodities; the real, defensible value lies in proprietary data and user context. The correct strategy is for companies to use LLMs to enhance their existing business and data, rather than selling their valuable context to model providers for pennies on the dollar.

Beyond the equity stake and Azure revenue, Satya Nadella highlights a core strategic benefit: royalty-free access to OpenAI's IP. For Microsoft, this is equivalent to having a "frontier model for free" to deeply integrate across its entire product suite, providing a massive competitive advantage without incremental licensing costs.

YipitData had data on millions of companies but could only afford to process it for a few hundred public tickers due to high manual cleaning costs. AI and LLMs have now made it economically viable to tag and structure this messy, long-tail data at scale, creating massive new product opportunities.