How AI is reshaping work and who gets to do it, according to Mercor's CEO

Three-year-old startup Mercor has become a $10 billion middleman in AI's data gold rush. The company connects AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic with former employees of Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and white-shoe law firms, paying them up to $200 an hour to share their industry expertise and train the AI models that could eventually automate their former employers out of business.

Today we're bringing you a conversation with CEO Brendan Foody from this year's Disrupt, where he explained why AI labs need high-skilled contractors instead of crowdsourced labor, how Scale AI's troubles accelerated Mercor's rise, and why he thinks the entire economy will converge on training AI agents.