Palantir's Customer Acquisition Strategy

Going all in on AI Bootcamps.

Palantir’s Bootcamp GTM strategy is genius.

They recently highlighted their bootcamp strategy on their latest Q4 quarterly earnings call. It’s their primary driver for customer acquisition.

But first… If you’re not familiar with Palantir…

Palantir makes products for human-driven analysis of real-world data.

The AI operations software is best known for its help in correlating massive unstructured data sets to find Osama Bin Laden.

The company was founded by Peter Thiel who wanted to apply fraud recognition software (the kind that was developed at PayPal) to fight terrorism. Initially, they were focused on providing capabilities for the intelligence, defense, and law enforcement sectors. Now they are helping public and private enterprises adopt and scale their advanced AI platform (AIP for short).

Over the past 2 years, they’ve been scaling their latest GTM strategy - AI Bootcamps.

The Bootcamp Strategy

Palantir is using Bootcamps for top-of-funnel demand gen and to land & expand faster with new & existing customers.

Alex Karp, CEO, explained in the earnings call that AIP bootcamps are designed to challenge customers to compare what they developed internally (no matter how many resources or years) to running their data on Palantir’s offerings for 10 hours to see the difference.

Palantir’s blog, Deploying Full Spectrum AI in Days: How AIP Bootcamps Work, explains:

Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) enables new and existing customers to dramatically accelerate high-value AI use cases. To meet the intense requirements of the moment, we have introduced AIP Bootcamps. In these immersive, hands-on-keyboard sessions, participants can expect to go from zero to use case in just one to five days.

The results speak for themselves. Our partners have been able to solve problems that they have been struggling with for years in a matter of days. They are able to build their own intuition and skillset to be able to independently identify and execute on AIP use cases in subsequent weeks. AIP Bootcamps are also fun for all involved, as winning tends to be.

Bootcamps = the new “pilots.”

End of 2022 - 92 completed for the year.

End of 2023 - 500+ completed for the year with over 465 organizations participating.

The Bootcamps are run by Palantir and their partners such as Accenture.

Bootcamps are used to accelerate and ease AI adoption for both new and existing customers. For example, Alex Karp explained that they landed a $3M contract via outbound prospecting, then deployed a bootcamp, and at the end of the same quarter expanded the contract to an enterprise-wide agreement likely to be significantly larger than the $3M. That is fast!

Why The Bootcamp Strategy Matters

Ultimately, Palantir is providing an exciting way for customers to try powerful software while shortening time-to-value and use case development for the business case.

The strategy is successful for a few reasons:

• Reduces friction in the buying process.

• The pitch goes from theoretical (slide decks) to real-life applications.

• Helps to figure out which use cases are most valuable to the customer.

• Accelerates expansion in new & existing customers.

• Helps to cross-pollinate & increase discovery of Palantir products, which leads to selling multiple products in the first sale, and thus higher TCV.

Participants have been able to “solve problems that they have been struggling with for years in a matter of days.”

“Demand is off the charts for AIP and bootcamps are the delivery mechanism.”

How Palantir Integrates the Bootcamp into the Sales Process

Step 1: Identify impactful use cases to unlock

Step 2: Deploy an MVP with your data in a Bootcamp

Step 3: Demonstrate ROI by developing workflows for production

Step 4: Scale deployment across organization

Step 5: Continuing building the AI-powered foundation for the customer

The Feedback

It’s clear bootcamps are generating buzz and excitement around Palantir’s products:

A Bootcamp Trend?

While there are plenty of virtual bootcamps, only some follow the Palantir model of doing them in person.

It looks like Snowflake has taken note and is doing an LLM Bootcamp:

Learn how to use generative AI to create natural language interfaces for your data and apps. In this LLM Bootcamp you’ll set up a pre-trained, open-source large language model, fine-tune it with private data, build an app to interact with it, and deploy it to production—securely and with proper governance.

I’d love to find other bootcamps to add here as examples. Have you come across any? Drop them in the comments.