Protests Against Palantir

+ New hints of where the AI TAM is really going

Welcome back to DailyPalantir! Tomorrow we’ll have a special recap newsletter from our Palantir Year In Review episode with special guest, Codestrap. Today — let’s get into the news.

Protests Against Palantir

Yesterday morning in the UK — protests broke out in front of Palantir’s London office.

The protests were a result of people not wanting Palantir to privatize the NHS, many of the protesters also upset about Palantir’s support of Israel.

Couple quick thoughts:

• Palantir got the NHS deal, so I don’t care much about protests stopping them from getting the deal now — brand wise they will have to continue to deal with this stigma until they transform the NHS, which I believe they will

• These people are protesting for LONGER wait times and MORE backlogs in the NHS, so….okay

• Palantir’s stance on Israel is very clear given they have picked a side — this WILL alienate people, and definitely alienate potential clients. They weighed the odds and ultimately picked to continue to be public about their support while maintaining the trust that they can still grow the business

• My 2 cents: most people protesting would never give up their private property, stop drinking their Starbucks, not order on amazon prime, etc….so the complaints that Palantir is the most evil company in the world while they type that on Instagram from an iPhone made by children in china is….well a bit hypocritical. You are either doing things in the world or complaining. I choose to do, and the far majority of people that complain eventually realize their complaints don’t do anything.

• Funny inside note I got: All the Palantir employees in London have been out of the office in London for the holidays…so there was no one even there when they protested in front of the office 💀

New Wedbush Note on Palantir

The note:

Dan Ives’s firm Wedbush — with the highest street PT on Palantir at $25 — put out a new note on them yesterday.

Dan Ives and his team actually get to go spend time with the people that work at Palantir, so I take them seriously when they speak as they have more insight into what’s going on at the company and how their strategies are beginning to scale

• They note that AIP is valuable to clients because of how it connects an organization’s ontology to produce business intelligence

• Bootcamps are scaling very well — 3 month pilots are now reduced to days, leading to shorter conversion times for clients who want to buy

• AIP is becoming an entire platform for companies to build on, keeping it incredibly sticky within the organization

• Partnerships with government entities in civil, healthcare, and justice going well for the company and should continue into 2024

Accenture Earnings Is a Tell Tale of Where AI Is Going

So, here’s an interest stat from Accenture’s latest earnings:

Last year, the consulting firm did 300M in generative AI sales. Last Quarter? 450M.

Why does this matter?

Accenture is a consulting firm — not a tech company. They have some level of software implementation, but they charge clients for strategy in order to transform their businesses. Generative AI strategies including mapping out how clients can effectively leverage AI, become more efficient, and use 3rd parties to build out large scale platforms for their organizations.

If a consulting company is making half a billion dollars in 90 days of selling generative AI services/strategy, it only signals to me that the TAM is beginning to grow to levels we can’t imagine for enterprises wanting to adopt AI.

Now, Palantir is a tech company actually selling the software needed to execute on the AI strategies Accenture lays out for their clients — this should indicate much more demand writ large for the entire industry, and as a result, Palantir should have an easier time selling.

Accenture is a Palantir distribution partner, along with PWC, and is working with them to implement the new federated data platform for the NHS over the next 5 years. They both originally partnered in 2022 — we haven’t heard much about the partnership, but if Accenture can actually start recommending Palantir as a core AI solution to the thousands of clients they have, we can see more adoption of Palantir from clients just by recommendation of an Accenture or PWC — this should be a major focus for the company going into 2024 because bootcamps will not be the only way to sell their product.

New Newsletter Segment - Revisiting Quotes

I’ve been digging through some Q3 earnings quotes thought this could be a fun new segment of the newsletter — maybe a “Revisiting Quotes” concept where we look at things that Karp, Shyam, Thiel, etc. have said and analyze them to the current day - might not be every newsletter but I am liking the idea.

The quote above was very interesting to me given how Palantir just won a $115M government Army Vantage extension.

While many have thought Palantir is competing with the “primes” — companies that are the go-to in order to win contracts from the defense budget — Palantir sees themselves more as a collaborator. In the quote from Shyam, he discusses how production of raw goods itself is now becoming software driven — in order to optimize mass scale production, you need software to drive that efficiency.

In the government, this means procuring software to make organization more efficient and data driven is necessary, while hardware companies can also leverage the power of Palantir to actually produce higher margins, lower costs, etc. when scaling.

Speaking of defense spending…

Let’s see what we can do in 2024.

That’s it for today — see you tomorrow in your inbox!