Palantir's big idea, on a nonprofit's budget

Palantir has a fancy word for something simple: ontology. Their own engineer explains it in five minutes: Palantir Ontology Overview. Their docs say it too.

Here's my version. An ontology is what your data actually means. What's this column in the spreadsheet? What's a "member"? How does this thing connect to that thing? It's the nouns and verbs of your business, and how they link.

Why it matters: AI wasn't trained on your business. It doesn't know what your data means. Palantir's guy says it plainly. The ontology is the context.

What I did with it

One of my clients is a nonprofit. A membership organization, about 7,000 to 8,000 members across all 50 states. And membership is going the opposite direction it used to, partly because culture changed.

They have a ton of moving parts. Events in different cities and states. Different kinds of memberships, and talk of consolidating them. Annual and monthly members, and all the renewals and cancellations. Social campaigns, Meta campaigns, website traffic. And an old, antiquated CRM sitting in the middle of it.

The goal was to free up the staff. It's a nonprofit. I want them focused on enrolling people and reaching out. The human stuff.

So I pulled everything into one place. Four years of data: website, social, membership, all of it. We built dashboards. But the real work was teaching the AI what the data means. What does every column mean? How does this connect to that? The context of how this specific organization works.

What it does now

They have data on demand. And the AI can now correlate things and show new angles we didn't know were there. Overlaps between systems nobody had connected. It's predicting outcomes. It's pointing at the places the staff should be looking.

Palantir-level intelligence, on a nonprofit's budget. I love it.

And you don't need Palantir to do it. You need to write down what your stuff means and let the AI read it.