Ask HN: How to get starting data for ML B2B product?

Chicken & egg dilemma: My team and I have an idea to improve employee engagement for enterprise companies, but it requires an abundant amount of employee data. We don’t have access to an enterprise employee dataset, therefore the idea/model is purely theory — we need data from an enterprise to even test if our models could work. Pitching companies for pilots have been hard because we can’t assure any value because our ask is more experimental / research in nature. Does anyone have suggestions/experience in getting medium-enterprise companies to give you their (anonymized) data for ML experimentation, with the precedent of hopefully giving value if the experiment yields validated models?

For background, we’ve played with a dataset from a friendly company of 15 employees and the results were positive.