In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I break down Alex Karp’s warning that the accelerating pace of AI innovation will create winners, losers, and companies headed toward irrelevance.
Highlights
00:02 — Last week, we heard about Palantir’s Q3 results. They were incredibly impressive, and I think what we saw in the letter that Palantir CEO Alex Karp sent out to shareholders was very much, I think, a survival guide for AI strategy, AI business, AI sort of thinking that’s needed today.
00:55 — Palantir’s astonishing growth rate shows that customers are coming to them eagerly, and once the customers are in, they’re increasing their spending at a very rapid rate. So, Palantir and Karp have real-world credibility into seeing what’s working for customers, what isn’t working, and Karp himself, a very colorful individual, extremely intelligent, well-spoken, and bluntly candid about what he thinks.
01:59 — Within that, the U.S. commercial business, which has been on fire the last two and a half years, grew 148% to almost a billion dollars, and now is bigger than its public sector business, which is where, for much of its 23-year history, Palantir’s business was concentrated.
02:26 — They had 64 deals bigger than $10 million, 107 deals bigger than $5 million in Q3. So, against that sort of success, here’s a little bit what Karp sees and what he shared in that shareholder letter. I go into a lot of detail about this in an article that’ll be up later this morning on CloudWars.com .
03:03 — The big point he made was that the pace of change is absolutely dizzying today now, and it can be either business leaders’ best friend or worst enemy because this is not going to let up. And a mindset from traditional technology says, “Well, I got two, three years to think about this, look at some different options, and then decide.”
04:32 — Karp said, “You know, very, very quickly, we are getting into a world of haves and have-nots. The haves are going to be very happy with their choices.” The have-nots are going to be miserable because, he said, we’ll see many of them drop down to what he called this middle layer, crowded with companies that are just incapable of really competing anymore.
