Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) used its AIPCon 11 conference on September 10, 2026, to showcase a growing roster of customers turning AI systems into measurable operational gains — from defense logistics to drug discovery.
Shares of Palantir traded at $165.86, down from the previous close of $170.30, as the company — which commands a market capitalization of roughly $399 billion — presented results that reinforce its positioning as an enterprise-AI operator rather than a speculative technology play.
Palantir reported last-12-months revenue of $6.16 billion with year-over-year growth of 79% and a gross profit margin of 84.8%, according to Q2 2026 figures referenced at the event.
CEO and co-founder Dr. Alex Karp opened the session with a blunt thesis on the company’s approach. "We will not build bullshit," he said, recounting an early exchange with a U.S. government general who had requested what Karp characterized as an impractical anti-gravity concept. An FDE responded, "But you are not smart enough to know how dumb you are." On AI security, Karp added, "You can capture the whole value of your stack in your enterprise with your own models using frontier models or open-weight models that are fine-tuned... We are in the business of getting paid after value creation."
NVIDIA's Alex Neefus described the chipmaker's supply chain as a model Palantir-style optimization. NVIDIA manages more than 600,000 parts in a Blackwell rack and millions of components from thousands of global suppliers. Using Palantir's suite — including cuOpt, NeMo Data Designer, DPO and LoRA techniques — NVIDIA identified what it calls its hardest supply-chain problem as a Constrained Material Allocation issue, measuring component speed through a metric called Time of Ownership. NVIDIA also revealed its smallest Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model outperformed its largest Nemotron 3 Ultra by 10 to 20 times in predictive correctness after post-training, at 95% lower cost than frontier models.
The operational case studies ran through defense, healthcare, insurance and media.
Elmet Group, which supports over 125 defense programs and more than 90 Department of Energy projects, contracted with Palantir within about two weeks of first contact in late May or early June. A four-person forward-deployed engineering team then delivered 10 applications across two divisions in two months.
L3Harris, which has $23 billion in annual sales, 44,000 employees and more than 150 acquisitions, now feeds 3.5 million data connections and over 5,000 scheduled data feeds into Palantir's Foundry platform. A glass shortage was identified in 10 minutes instead of the typical three months and 30 people.
In pharmaceuticals, Novartis reported its Data 42 lake encompasses more than 3,000 clinical trials, over 1 million patient records and genomics and proteomics data. Multi-tissue proteomic analysis time dropped from three days manually to 45 minutes, and a prototype now scans 41,000 drug-indication pairings.
Acrisure cut post-merger integration time from the usual 12 to 24 months down to roughly three months and completed a CRM implementation via Palantir's team in two hours.
The FAA's Nick Fuller referenced the January 2025 collision at Reagan National Airport (DCA) while discussing Flight Plan 2026, launched in January 2026 to create an Aviation Safety Management Office. "Data without context and without the ability to take action delivers no value," Fuller said. "Before the tragic collision at DCA in January of 2025, warning signals were there... The issue was not a lack of data. It was an inability to wield that data to drive effective, timely decisions."
Other deployments included Hexion, which achieved a $300 million EBITDA improvement over three years through modernization; Zeta Global, delivering 600% to 700% return on marketing spend and 295% ROI across technology for current customers, with 51% of the Fortune 100 as clients across a proprietary data cloud covering 240 million Americans; and USA Today Co, shifting toward an intelligence organization connecting reader profiles across its national platform and more than 200 local properties.
