Palantir's Shyam Sankar Says AI Is Experiential And If You Pay Consultants To Help You Think About Deployment 'You're Just Lighting Money On Fire'

Palantir Technologies, Inc. PLTR shares have been on a tear ever since the company was added to the S&P 500 Index. The stock inflection has followed an inflection in the company’s fundamentals, and on Tuesday the data analytics company’s CTO Shyam Sankar acknowledged that the company is facing a surge in demand.

Offering Business Value: “This is a unique moment for Palantir,” said Sankar in an interview with CNBC. The commercial business is seeing tailwinds, the rate of the adoption of artificial intelligence is increasing, and enterprise automation is where the value is and the toolchain, he said, adding that “It’s a 10-year overnight success.”

The foundational investments Palantir made in an ontology are the prerequisites for quickly putting these workflows into production, from a “charismatic prototype to actual business value,” the executive said.

He cited one of Palantir’s clients, a very large U.S. insurance company, as a testimony. The Alex Karp-led company automated all of the insurance underwriting, reducing the time required to do the process from two days to three hours. It is not just time saved, which is the first-order benefit, but a customer can reap the second-order benefit of differentiating from competition, he said, adding that this is a fundamental dislocation of the market.

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Taking On Biggies: On Palantir’s advantages over bigger rivals such as Microsoft, IBM and Alphabet all of which offer services to improve the productivity of clients, Sankar said all the value is going to companies that have built a tool chain that allows you to get to production quickly. “We've spent the better part of a decade building exactly that,” he said.

“You want to solve the whole problem; you have to be able to solve the whole problem and provide the regulators the transparency, the assurance…..they need to say ‘yes this model can be in production, this workflow can be AI-enabled,” he added.

Sankar also weighed in the cultural differences that forced them to take different approaches toward AI. He noted that Europe looks like a “deer in headlights,” as they try to think through the problem. “If there's anything about AI, it is fundamentally experiential; you cannot think your way through it,” he said.

“If you're paying consultants to help you to think about how to deploy it, you're just lighting money on fire. You have got to roll up your sleeves and get busy implementing it and that is a unique strength of the American commercial markets.”

AI’s Affordability: When asked whether AI has become more affordable, Sankar said it has become more effective. “You kind of get what you pay for and certainly people view us as a premium product but when you get results in weeks instead of years it's clearly worth it,” he said.

He also weighed in on the opportunity offered by the worsening geopolitical tensions around the world. “We are as America in an undeclared state of emergency,” he said pointing to the massacre in Israel a year back, the Ukraine war, Iran’s attack on the U.S. bases, and the Chinese Communist Party’s operations in the South China Sea.

“These are not disconnected events; there is an axis of authoritarians who have lined up to counter Western and American interests here and we have to rise to that occasion,” the Palantir CTO said. “A big part of that is not just the work we do with the military, AI-enabling to kill change, drive deterrence to scare the bejesus out of our enemies but also to reindustrialize America,” he added.

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Photo: Cory Doctorow Via Flickr.