I mean, just bribing people to get the contracts should be an order of magnitude cheaper, right?
The general approach would be “give us 2-4 weeks to integrate your data and give you a demo”, and would give organizations a demo of the software using their own data.
There were some well known stories internally, of things like police agencies forgetting to ask about the product at all, and instead taking notes on suspects and investigations being shown to them in the demo for further follow up, because it was making connections and breakthroughs on stalled or cold cases. Those were the ones that they knew were hooked.
The flip side of this is the cost of deploying anywhere from 2-20 engineers into the field to handle the system setup and integration on the fly.
Not a sales guy, but I would just emailed them the notes later (or printed it beforehand) so they could just sit back and watch it happen.
However, most of the time the way they won over their (usually enormous) clients was just as you describe: they took a few weeks to pick through the client's existing data hoards, mapped out what were often dozens or hundreds of disconnected databases, found common identifiers for entities, hooked them all up into a unifying system and then just... queried it. Data unification on its own yielded really impressive results for the clients. To be fair, the company had built up some compelling experience/tech around doing said data unification, but that stopped short of any of the "AI" and was never really how they marketed themselves. Some at the company always saw that part of the process as just a prerequisite for "the real product", but in practice it seemed to be the most useful part.
It's amazing how inefficient data-usage is throughout so many large organizations.
It's making me think that anyone who is not well-versed in at least the basics of database theory is crippled in the information economy. A lot of "tool-based" problems that people complain about are in fact user problems, when certain teams aren't maintaining their data with clear identifiers or internal standards.
Any big org that is silo'd is gonna have a big problem re: clear identifiers and internal standards. Heck, once we passed 500 headcount even just file naming convention was tough to roll out!
| Week# | clientid | key |
| W01 | CLI001 | CLI001W01|
You use this newly created key to match data on your databases/files
DATABASE A
Field List: {Temperature, Price, PART NUMBER, Delivery Time, SERIAL NUMBER}
DATABASE B:
Field List: {Mass, Length, Width, Height, PART NUMBER, Volume, SERIAL NUMBER}
You just have to create a new concatenation of PART NUMBER and SERIAL NUMBER, and now you have a unique identifier that will match between the two databases, and you can easily check which unique instances are present in both databases, and which in A are missing from B and vice versa.
Not sure what your level of coding proficiency is, but a flowchart of how you might get started increasing data wizardry would be something like this:
EXCEL
Master the following functions: INDEX/MATCH, Nested IF statements (especially using AND, OR, XOR, and NOT), IF/ISERROR, ISBLANK, CONCATENATE, and figure out how to combine all of these creatively
Master the creation and formatting of Pivot Tables
POWER QUERY
Master Power Query (you'll want to use online tutorials for this)
Once you're really, really proficient in Power Query, you may as well just start learning SQL and writing your own queries. Udacity and Udemy have multiple excellent free courses in SQL and Python.
Some more keywords you may want to look into:
- Relational Database theory - Bryce-Codd Normalization - CRUD applications - essentialsql.com - ExcelJet - MrExcel - Chandoo
I am by no means a real master, and my degree is in engineering, not programming, but independent research into basic database management has propelled me far past many coworkers in terms of efficacy. It really is astonishing how little the average person knows about proper database operation, despite the fact that most modern companies live and die by the strength of their data.
For reference Nike only spent 7-8 times that on marketing in the same year.
It's not necessarily wrong if they hold the customer for decades, but that depends on the stickiness of the contract.
I'd imagine for a company like palantir to win in the long run would require the western world to value surveillance at the same level as tanks, ships, and fighter platforms. At which point they look like a digital Raytheon or BAE.