Roundtable on Mechanisms for a Sustainable AI Data Economy

As data becomes increasingly central to AI model development and deployment, ensuring both its broadest applicable use and fair compensation for contributors will be important to maximizing eco-system wide innovation and value creation. Well-functioning market mechanisms can help expand participation, support a diverse and competitive AI ecosystem, and enable the benefits of AI-driven growth to reach a broader share of the economy.

The roundtable will bring together AI experts, data stakeholders, and policymakers at Microsoft Research in New York on Friday, September 18, with an optional dinner the evening before.

This is a one-day working session that aims to specify several tangible mechanisms to fill in the missing markets and align incentives at the pre-training, post-training, and inference (grounding) stages of AI.

Following two framing keynotes by invited dignitaries from the technology and policy spaces, participants will split into working groups to design concrete mechanisms and proposals. The convening brings together policymakers, market-design economists, AI model trainers, software engineers, product leaders, and artist organizations.

Expert knowledge across domains will be shared and best practice from analogous sustainable markets drawn on to produce recommendations, principles, and implementable mechanisms feasible for industry and policy deployment.