What does the Australian supermarket chain Coles have in common with the CIA? They have each been customers since last week Palantir TechnologiesAmerican technology company “focused on creating the world’s best user experience with data.”
As a part of the three-year deal, Coles plans to roll out Palantir’s tools in greater than 840 supermarkets to cut the prices and “redefine the way we think about our workforce.”
The technology company, named after the magical seeing stones from The Lord of the Rings, offers end-to-end software that collects, organizes and visualizes customer data into “one platform to rule all of them“. In the case of an intelligence agency, Palantir’s tools could also be helpful discover a terrorist cell through telephone calls and financial transactions; in a health care organization, they’ll find ways to lower your expenses shortening stays in emergency departments.
For Coles, goal is to “optimize your workforce” by analyzing “over 10 billion rows of data covering every store, team member, shift and allocation across all time slots, every day.”
The announcement is here connected according to Coles’ plan to avoid wasting $1 billion over the following 4 years and beyond 2019 Big Data agreement with Microsoftconstructing effort robotic delivery centersand introduction cameras tracking customers and other technologically advanced security measures.
Palantir trial
What might Palantir-Coles cooperation appear like in practice?
Typically, Palantir first sends “deployed engineers” to start out working with the organization’s data, which is commonly messy, incomplete and fragmented. These engineers work with various departments and stakeholders to mix data into one compatible whole called “Ontology”, which comprises all information deemed relevant.
Then the info will be entered into the Palantir platforms – on this case, configurable software called Foundry and Artificial intelligence platform.
Platforms enable customers to explore data dense yet user-friendly interfaces crammed with columns and rows, fields and contours. The AI platform also introduces language models just like ChatGPT.
Users can compare earnings between branches, flag a store that appears inefficient, or discover an upcoming high-spending period based on historical patterns.
This all probably seems trivial, even boring. It’s actually less overtly problematic than Palantir’s work with governments and law enforcement, which has been heavily criticized for enabling deportation based on data Or racist policeand I saw an organization described as “evil“.
However, a contract doesn’t should be overtly sinister to be significant. The surveillance and control technology is silent becomes infrastructure, moving from front-page news to something quietly ticking within the background. In this sense, Palantir is moving from the visible to the operational, unnoticed but powerfully shaping the lives and livelihoods of Australian supermarket staff and customers.
Workforce optimization
We can briefly outline three implications of this agreement.
Firstly, by signing this agreement, Coles is presenting itself as forward-looking and logistically oriented. Grocery and food market jobs are increasingly becoming data, as are hedge funds, health care, and immigration, which other Palantir clients coordinate.
Last yr, supermarkets were under fire increasing profit margin by the pandemic and the fee of living crisis and accused of underpaying employees.
The Palantir deal continues this mining trajectory. Instead of paying staff more or passing the savings on to customers, Coles has chosen to speculate thousands and thousands in technology to “solve workforce costs” as a part of this system greater effort to scale back costs by $1 billion over the following 4 years. Food (and the labor needed to grow, package, and ship it) is transformed from a human need into an optimization problem.
Garden surrounded by a wall
Secondly, dependency. How I discovered my very own research, Palantir customers enjoy comprehensive data and recent features, but in addition they turn into depending on them. Data is growing; recent servers are needed; License fees are high, but they need to be paid.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Like Apple or Amazon, Palantir’s services excel at making a “seller lock,” an ideal walled garden that is hard for purchasers to depart. This pattern suggests that over the following three years, Coles will increasingly depend on Silicon Valley technology to know and manage its business operations. An organization that sells 1 / 4 of Australian groceries could turn into operationally depending on the US tech titan.
Way of seeing
Finally a vision. What Palantir sells is actually a way of seeing. Its dashboards promise view through God’s eyes that may span your entire organization or zoom in on granular information to locate that “needle in a haystack” knowledge.
It has been claimed that this data-driven view is a shortcut to total knowledgea option to map every operation, expose every necessary element, and discover every inefficiency.
Palantir
However, this data inevitably excludes necessary social, financial and environmental information. The sweat of staff attempting to pack at pace, the belt-tightening of consumers attempting to make ends meet, and the struggle of farmers to survive unexpected climate impacts will remain.
Details like these never appear on the platform – and if they are not data, they do not matter. Will Palantir’s data-driven myopia impact the best way Coles views its employees and customers?
By placing Palantir at the middle of its business, Coles is quietly sneaking in several key assumptions: that food is a commodity that should be optimized, that paying for work is a risk slightly than a responsibility, and that data can capture all the pieces that is necessary. In time increased food insecurityAustralians should definitely ask themselves whether that is the direction one in all our major grocery suppliers should take.