[paxys]

Short answer is that they don't - not a profit anyway.

Palantir was one of the very early Silicon Valley firms that were going around selling businesses the idea that "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" would transform the way they work. A lot of them did buy it, and Palantir ended up with lots of funding (over $2 billion) and a ridiculous valuation ($41 billion at its peak, somewhere around $11 billion now - depending on who you ask).

They tried to build several iterations of one-size-fits-all software to ingest and process data and come up with visualizations and other analysis that they could sell to businesses, but they all failed.

Now, like 15 years later, they are just one of the hundreds of consulting companies that build custom solutions for businesses and other organizations to crunch their data. Their only differentiator is the fat government contracts they get because of Peter Thiel's connections.