Tech companies are no strangers to taking on personas. Salesforce built its existence around Hawai’i’s ‘Ohana’ culture, with CEO Marc Benioff championing himself as the dad at the head of the big family dinner table. Palantir – the notoriously mysterious data company – seems to have a strong affection for the Lord of the Rings.
Not particularly regarded as players in the same field until recently, Palantir might be a company that Salesforce wants to watch, especially as the AI race evolves – but what exactly does Palantir bring to the table?
Who Is Palantir?
Putting the Middle-earth references to the side, Palantir Technologies’ appeal and brand is shrouded in mystery. In fact, some argue that that is their brand, with WIRED releasing a piece on the company titled “What Does Palantir Actually Do?”
“Palantir has been so infamous for so long that, for some people, its name has become a cultural shorthand for dystopian surveillance,” WIRED writer Caroline Haskins wrote. The company was co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel in 2003 and is now run by the “creepy CEO” Alex Karp, who has become a figurehead for the company’s confusing work.
Former Palantir employee Juan Sebastián Pinto believes that the company’s air of mystery is definitely intentional, expressing that the selling point isn’t the software but “the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems.” It really brings us ever closer to a Severance-esque dystopia.
“Palantir often uses the language and aesthetics of warfare, painting itself as a powerful, quasi-military intelligence partner,” he said.
As explained by the company themselves, Palantir is a software company “that helps organizations understand their own data”, with two key platforms called Foundry and Gotham.
The firm has worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US Department of Defense, and the Israeli military, sparking numerous protests but also solidifying the importance of their work with the US Government.
As powerful as they may be, it’s evident that Palantir’s darker underbelly has a part to play not only in the company’s reputation but also in the future of its markets.
A Questionable Underbelly
If you were to ask someone about Palantir, you would quickly hear the words “weird”, “creepy”, or “unusual”. This is not necessarily connected to the company’s work, which is simply oriented around fixing and sorting data, but the messaging of the company and what it is capable of.
Since leaving Palantir, Pinto told WIRED that he had been spending increasing amounts of time considering Palantir’s ability to parse and connect vast amounts of data, citing the concerns around the platform not being able to “eliminate human bias.”
Another employee warned that Palantir is indeed a powerful technology, but that when it was in the wrong hands, it could be “really dangerous” – even going as far as to say that people should be scared of it.
These fears are not entirely unfounded either – in Palantir’s February 2025 earnings call, Alex Karp stressed that Palantir was out to “disrupt” their efforts, as well as “scare enemies, and on occasion, kill them.”
Unsurprisingly, this further spurred discussions over what kind of role Palantir plays in the US government, including fears around surveillance and weaponized automation tools, and what kind of impacts these have in President Trump’s America.
How Powerful Is Palantir’s AI?
So, what makes Palantir so powerful? Well, amongst other things, it’s the company’s capabilities in artificial intelligence.
On the surface level, as of September 2025, Palantir have secured 139 deals worth over $1M each, with 51 exceeding $5M and 31 surpassing $10M, with the biggest deals lying with the US Army, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), BP, and NHS England.
Over the last two years, Palantir have also seen incredible growth within their commercial business side thanks to its proprietary AI tool ‘Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform’ (AIP), which was released in 2023.
AIP allows users to build AI apps, actions, and agents end-to-end with evaluation tooling and pre-built examples, and has use cases for industries from aerospace and aviation to retail and consumer goods.
Customers are seeing results too – Palantir’s revenue surpassed $1B for the first time last quarter, and the stock shot up an impressive 110% this year so far thanks to results from the platform’s capabilities.
Bank of America analyst Mariana Perez Mora recently wrote that almost three years after the breakout of Large Language Models (LLMs), “many enterprises continue to struggle to realize a meaningful value-add from the AI revolution.”
“Palantir customers continue to be an exception,” she wrote.
Additionally, Mora mentioned that the number of companies mentioning Palantir on earnings calls grew more than four times in the second quarter of 2025, indicating the “strengthening recognition of [Palantir’s] solutions as top-notch AI business implementation.”
Should Salesforce Be Worried?
According to stock market analysis company Nasdaq, Palantir is the “early leader” when it comes to moves in the AI industry. With such prolific deals under its belt, the company have already been making a considerable impact within the field, with a focus on application, workflow layers, and where the platform can help provide the relevant information and tools to complete tasks.
Salesforce, on the other hand, is considered a later player. Although the cloud giant has had AI products in its suite since 2016, there is no doubt that their biggest effort – and subsequently results – have been centered around Agentforce.
Agentforce has only been out for a year, and there has been continuous skepticism over the tool’s results, including why out of the 12,500 reported Agentforce deals, only just over 6,000 of them are paid.
Palantir is also currently the fastest-growing company, with revenue growth of 68% YoY (year-over-year) compared to 10% for Salesforce.
Salesforce expert and Salesforce Ben’s Technical Director, Peter Chittum, says that he anticipates big things for Palantir and that Salesforce should pay attention.
“With Palantir pioneering the use of AI to understand your customers’ space, I think Palantir is Salesforce’s next big competitor,” he said. “No doubt about it. Not in the CRM space, but in AI agents and business app platforms in the AI era.”
However, Marc Benioff remains staunchly unruffled, commending Salesforce’s prices as “so much lower” and highlighting the successful deal poaching of a recent US Army contract.
The step into this competitive space has already begun, and it is likely to continue here. Does that mean Salesforce should be worried? Worried, no. Prepared? Yes.
Final Thoughts
There is no doubt that Palantir is both a company and a technology enveloped with mystery. With a controversial reputation and a CEO that ensures the company makes the headlines – for better or for worse – it’s easy to be absorbed into the unusual nature of it all.
However, it is much more than that. Palantir sits on a series of AI solutions that are already bringing in considerable results, and they have a hand in some of the biggest organizations across the US and UK.
This shouldn’t ring alarm bells at Salesforce HQ necessarily – but Benioff has already made the competitive comparison, indicating that he won’t just leave it here.
How the two companies interact in the future will be something to watch, especially as both Palantir and Salesforce approach growing targets and increasing investor pressure. Will one champion and one fall behind? Or will both paint a different story? Only time will tell.
