Hello everybody. I'm here at Pounder's end of year December event Paragon and I'm here for a very very special interview to talk about a very special partnership. I'm here with Justin who leads commercial AI at NVIDIA and Kevin who leads commercial sales at Pounder. Thank you both for being here.

>> Thanks for having me. It's great to be good to see you.

>> So let I I want to start off by saying this. I come from the retail investor community and a lot of us for the past four years have been waiting for the moment that Nvidia and Poundro would work together. We knew that you know these are the two companies controlling AI. Dr. Karp constantly talks about chips and ontology and a partnership usually that is special probably should take time to evolve and I think what we're going to talk about today is pretty special. So I guess we'll get started with you Justin. How did this partnership even come to fruition?

>> You know I think uh just looking at the work that the Palunteer team have done through ontology we realized it's foundational across you know virtually every enterprise. So it's one of the most important enterprise platforms on the market and we thought there was a huge opportunity to work together to continue to accelerate the work that Palunteer has done through uh our CUDA libraries and through Neotron models and bring you know I'll say specialized intelligence to the world's enterprises together.

>> Kevin, your take on how this partnership started?

>> Uh I I think for me and you know it it was over a year ago Dr. Karp said that a lot of the value for in AI was going to be about connecting ontology to the chips.

>> Yeah.

>> And and and I think we we sort of come to came to learn that like connecting our ontology to your accelerated computing platform uh is a big uh game changer for our customers and going through that process um of actually implementing it putting it into the field was worth trying and we didn't have to try for that long. We we started our partnership uh I think maybe 3 4 weeks into it. We already had a customer up and running uh on you know on on Nvidia products with Nvidia models uh in ontology uh for for Lowe's for one of our customers and it was a mutual customer which helped move things quicker but um you know when our teams can work together and show value in what ended up I think being three weeks

>> uh you know that's a pretty good start to any kind of partnership. Yeah, I think the synergist the synergies between Pounder and Nvidia are exciting because you guys both move really fast. Uh the the standard that Jensen and Car pulled the company to, you know, if you just listen to some of the employees speak about the the work culture and the the mission behind the work culture is why people want to work so hard. It it it would make sense that in 3 to four weeks a customer is up and running and getting started. In terms of the technicalities of the partnership, uh you mentioned the ontology is integral towards the enterprise stack. when did that realization happen and why do you think the ontology is being adopted by so many organizations and philosophically how do you think they will continue to adopt the ontology?

Yeah, I think um you know when I when we started to engage uh in kind of these first customer engagements, we quickly realized uh you know the the power of Palunteer is really taking what were a bunch of let's say narrowly optimized systems across a supply chain and giving you a way to globally optimize across the all the business systems and giving you kind of this unified data model that is the the data that you want to ground artificial intelligence into to make business decisions. Um, and so as soon as we started engaging uh Lowe's in this in this case, you know, they had 1,700, I think, retail locations, 130 distribution centers, and over 7,000 suppliers that they're trying to optimize inventory across to make sure that shelves are full to drive revenue. And, you know, by bringing together the power of accelerated computing, we could basically do that supply chain reoptimization in real time when there's a new event such as like a weather event in the supply chain. um which lets you basically maintain you know stock shelves and grow the business and so for every company when you can basically pro provide this uh let's say operational you know decision intelligence that lets you run your company in a more profitable way and helps you grow your business you know there's there's obviously very very you know fast engagements to deliver value

>> Kevin the the oper operationalization of uh LLMs can you speak to that a little bit in terms of obviously Nvidia's hardware is necessary train these LLMs, but it seems like Pounders's orchestration to get the business intelligence is crucial to making them useful in an enterprise.

>> Yeah, I I think you know, we we we thought a lot about how we take this technology and drive like serious business value. You we had a customer on stage tonight that talked about how they've reduced um 48 hour fatalities at a hospital by 68%. And you know some of these like so the application of the technology really matters. So there's you know we could we could we could create a tech stack. We could uh optimize it for maybe consumer use or you know general kind of like hobbyist kind of things or we can we can drive this technology actually into the institution and you can have real impact. You know we had there was a construction company on stage that said you know that this is actually their operating system right. So, so we

>> said they said they replace 97% of all the other software stack.

>> Yeah. Yeah. In 12 months. Yeah. In 12 months. And and that's a really really powerful thing. And you know there there's some things that we're we're seeing in the market that I I don't really I'm not sure they were even doable 6 months ago,

>> you know. So, it's like if if I can help an insurance company, you know, process a uh, you know, an underwriting or a claim in a matter of essentially minutes, like that wasn't really even possible a few months ago. If if we could go into a hospital and help the the person that's trying to schedule, you know, nurses, doctors, like be in the right place at the right time with the right equipment, and therefore you can move patients through faster. um well, you know, that saves lives. Yeah.

>> And and it changes the whole operation of the institution. So I I I think like, you know, I think we've all experienced large language models in in our in our in on our phones, in our pockets. But if if we can if we could take this technology into the institution and help the the these companies, these organizations, these governments operate better, operate better at the thing that is consistent with their mission. I um well, that's what our company's all about. And and and we wake up every day thinking about that. I think we were, you know, fortunate to meet a company that that also cared a lot about that and could move at pace and speed with us with amazing engineers. You know, we've had um I'd say over the years we've often times tried to work with companies to say, "Hey, maybe you should have a forward deployed engineering team, too."

>> And and and that's often times worked really well. It's like even just the concept of trying is is sometimes like really really good. It's like, "Hey, we should do engineering for the purpose of delivering a result." Well, you know, we just barely talked about it at a conference a few weeks ago and then, you know, within days there's a team of NVIDIA, four deployed engineers working side by side with our people and I don't it's very hard to tell the difference between your team and ours and and and that's that's really cool.

>> Yeah. One thing that uh I was speaking to one of the engineers who's who's central to the partnership is that both companies take on the burden of value creation as Dr. Karp says like you don't want to get paid until you actually prove that you can be valuable for a company. Um, Nvidia is a hardware company, but at a high level, Justin, can you explain more about CUDA and the software integration with Pounder and why that makes sense for this partnership?

>> Yeah, I mean, I I think, you know, from our early days, people know us originally as a gaming company. Yes.

>> And I think Jensen has talked about this for a long time. Uh, for us to create value in the market, we had to accelerate games to create a better visual interactive experience for gamers, right? And then obviously people wanted our product to to get that you know best-in-class like interactive experience. And the same thing is true here in terms of uh processing uh data analytics, data processing and artificial intelligence. uh the lower the latency uh the more data that you can look at in your business, the better decisions that you can make uh you know across operations of your business from you know customer success to claims processing to uh supply chain to operations and so uh that's why kind of this natural partnership um and as KK said you know we are a software company we build we uh started our early days with CUDA building libraries for every domain that we wanted to go into at this point I think we have over 200 100 of these CUDA libraries to accelerate many different uh stages of these workflows. And so the exciting thing working with the Palunteer team is every engagement starts with the customer need like what's the big business problem they're trying to solve, right? How do we help them get to business value faster? How do we reduce the let's say the compute cost to drive that business decision and then ultimately help them help them take it to production?

Kevin, can you speak a little bit to uh about compute at the edge and edge networking and kind of how this partnership might play a role in that as well?

>> Yeah, I I think that that's going to be critical. I like I've thought a lot about, you know, if you go back 15 years like when when the consumers had, you know, iPhone applications in their pocket and then but but but maybe our operators downra in a battlefield, you know, had more of equivalent to a two-way radio, right? and and and you know, so it's like getting the technology that that the best technology that we that anybody in the US can have on the phone and and using it for a mission purpose, you know, out in the field is going to be really important. And so I think that does mean a lot of edge. I think it means it means like like figuring out how to do a lot of this stuff on prem inside of customer data centers, uh on you know the AI factories, um the super paws, some of the products you have. So we're we're working through a lot of that and I think I think we're we've already seen a lot of customer demand. um to really you know run our product with Nvidia's product um and the various different models that they can get you know more or less inside their perimeter and and I think that's that's a consistent architecture with doing something on the edge and I I I think that's um I think that's actually going to be a really big trend to use this because you you know you you want to control this technology and be in some sense guaranteed that you have access to it.

>> Yeah. Because sometimes for the cloud you're not guaranteed. I mean, sometimes it takes 20 seconds to get the data back and that's life or death decisions.

>> Yeah. And and and if and if you're going to have problems like that, like you you kind of want to be able to control it end to end, you know? So, it's like maybe it's not going to be perfect, but like I I want to I actually want to own this. I want to be responsible for it end to end and we want to help our customers do that. Um uh and and I think that's really important. The um you know, you you've asked a lot over over over the the time that we've known each other about about our boot camps and and our joint go to market.

>> I got to speak at an NVIDIA boot camp today.

>> Yeah. I want to throw this in because I think we with about I don't know two or three weeks of planning, it wasn't that much. We had this event scheduled. We were talking. We said, "Hey, maybe we should do, you know, a boot camp with a customer um day of our Paragon event." And we said, "Okay, let's try it." And and uh I think we had one in mind. We ended up, I think, with seven total. And and you know, seven is not a massive number, but the variety, I think, was really interesting. We had uh we had a bank. Uh we had a few different sort of like electronic device manufacturers. We had a a a pharmaceutical company. We had a a pharmaceutical manufacturer pharmaceutical uh uh uh retail company. Um I'm probably not naming them all, but there was uh I don't know it was it was it was really interesting, really fun.

>> But to your point, I think uh the power of ontology connected to accelerating computing crosses every industry. And so to give another example at the edge uh that that the Teton ranch Yes. is starting to use uh let's say vision analytics uh to watch the rodeo to help both the judges and the broadcasters tell a better story about you know about uh rodeo uh which is a really awesome use case that starts to cross into media and entertainment um and so we're really excited about that announcement here at the show but this partnership is multifaceted across so many different industries the other industry that we made an announcement about is this this uh program we call chain reaction y and that's because I think both companies realize, you know, uh that we're at this moment where we want to build this uh this digital intelligence to power the US economy. It's great for, you know, the US to lead in this in this way. Uh the US has such a huge demand for uh this this artificial intelligence to power a range of new business applications. Um and so by working together we can really start to build these gigawatt data centers uh and and look at the entire supply chain from power generation to distribution to construction to data center operations to bring this infrastructure online faster and more efficiently by the two companies working together. So you know this multiaceted partnership continues to grow really across every industry.

>> Yeah. And and that was going to be my my last question. Uh thank you again both for taking the time to do this. uh chain reaction uh we all got to see that publicly announced today and it it it blew me away because it it it almost hit me like a break like obviously the data center buildout is growing exponentially. Pounder has software that has been instrumental towards many different energy infrastructure companies. PG&E is one of the ones that comes to mind in terms of dealing with wildfires. Kevin, can you speak to the idea of this partnership continuing to expand and why why you think Palanteer software should be a deacto AI infrastructure operating system for the data center buildout? Yeah, I I think the example that Kavanaaugh guy gave the the gentleman from Kavanaaugh construction gave now now that's you know construction is a really important aspect to this buildout but he wasn't talking about necessarily like you know foundry as his operating system or you know using AI to better his operating system he was talking about the Kavanaaugh operating system

>> right now this is an operating system that is yours and and I think that's a that's a really big piece because while we could deliver a lot out of the box and we we could deliver a lot of software sort of like that is consistent with lots of different companies. That that last bit, that last mile, the forward deployed engineer, the the unique ontology build like that is what makes you these our customers and and any company special and and and it's the difference between winning and losing in some cases. It's the difference between your project being on time or not on time. uh getting this infrastructure stood up, you know, the these data centers every day that the construction project is late, you can measure in profits and and and so um I think that like in in in some sense like we want to build the operating system that

>> is our customers

>> and and and you could do that with with having a lot of technology that we have in our stack, but but that last mile is um well that that's sort of like that's your weapon, right?

>> And and I think and I think that that's what we want to deliver to all of our customers.

Justin, Kevin, thank you for the time. This was absolutely awesome and congrats on the partnership and we hope to see it extend over the next decade.

>> All right. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the channel. We are here at Pounder's end of year 2025 event, Paragon. I'm here with a familiar guest. Haven't spoke to him since June of 2024.

>> No, it's been a minute.

>> It's been a minute, but we're back. We both kind of grew our beards a little bit.

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> Uh Bill Ward from North Slope. Bill, thanks for being here.

>> Oh my gosh, thanks for having me.

There's thousands of AWS firms, GCP firms, Azure firms. there's not that many Palunteer firms and you're one of the first ones.

>> Well, I think one of the big reasons that that's true is that Palunteer is not a consulting company. Uh and I mean this was something that was very hard for uh a lot of people to understand back when I worked at Palanteer. This conversation would come up all the time. And I think one of the very cool things that uh people are starting to understand about Palunteer today is that the way that you build quality software is by forward deploying and building against specific missions and figuring out how you accelerate specific outcomes. And that's what Foundry is, right? It started as uh ways for us to go win faster and it's become this customer product that you can go win on on your own, right? And one of the things that's very exciting for us is we also don't consider ourselves to be a consulting company. We're a software company that ships specific outcomes on the Palunteer platform for our customers. And Palanteer is an enterprise operating system. We build applications that are compounding the value of that platform so that people can get more work done.

It's almost like the FTE model that Palenter introduced. you guys are the manifestation of that in a new company.

>> Uh we we uh are very privileged to get to do this work and uh I think it's hard to compare yourself to Palunteer FTEEs, but uh we're very honored to be doing this work alongside them and I think there's there's a lot of hype around the FTE model right now.

>> Yes.

>> And one of the things that you know we feel very strongly and I think those of us who worked at Palunteer at the North Slope team uh feel very deeply is uh you can't just slap a label on a thing. Yes. uh it has much more to I mean all the stories that we've been hearing here tonight of going to ground with the actual operators in a business trying to solve the specific problem with them like we are on their team like we own that outcome ourselves Dr. Dr. Karp often talks about us owning the value creation risk right for our customers. That's very much how we operate too.

>> Yeah. The burden of value creation I think is one of the most interesting things about Palenter. It's something I personally have tried to apply in my life. How can I give more to to in my business the audience uh than I take and you have to accept the burden of value creation. So a year ago you guys decided uh that there's companies across the world that should be implementing pounder software but they don't know how to and you guys wanted to take the burden of actually showing how to do this. Um since then what has changed over the past year in terms of the rate of growth you're seeing in more companies that are at least

>> interested to have a conversation around implementing Foundry in their corporation?

>> Yeah, I think there's there's two things that people are waking up to. First is the true magic of Palunteer being that you can solve specific problems which you always get a better outcome for your business when you're solving a specific problem than you do when you try to solve it generically. Right? Generic solutions lead to commoditization. You're doing the same workflow everybody else is doing. And all the businesses that are here, all the businesses that we work with are trying to do something category redefining, right? They're trying to change how their business operates, how their industry operates. And you have to do that by doing something special and different. And the magic of Palunteer is you actually get to go build the software to do that special and different thing. Uh even if you're not a technology company like Palunteer. I mean at Palanteer we built a lot of our own internal software. At North Slope we're doing the same thing. We're building it on AFTD which is you know sort of the tip of the spear of Palunteer's product line. And we believe that that's the right way to build any kind of business. But that's traditionally been the preserve of an enterprise technology company. But now companies there was one company tonight that's been around for 140 years. They look more like a technology company than many Silicon Valley startups because they are building their entire organization with specific solutions on Palunteer. And that's that's a thing that I think is a big change from a few years ago where people didn't quite understand how powerful that could be. And now there is this community here. And it's still a very small group, but there's a small group of people who are going to go lead the next century who are here who have figured that out.

Is the rise of AI prompting more inbound for you guys? because uh just hooking up chatgbt to an enterprise is not a way to actually implement AI.

>> Yeah, I mean it very much is and I I mean Palunteer is creating this market right uh by offering this solution but I think the biggest change that we've seen is people have tried the chat GPT experiment they have seen that doing a bunch of those uh in isolated silos doesn't really work. It's hard to oneshot a solution to a problem. But if you're operating on the Palunteer platform, you actually can build a compounding application layer on top of the operating system where every time you solve a new problem, it's actually making your previous solutions to the old problems better, faster. Uh, and the agents that you have running around your business operating alongside your people are actually getting smarter and more effective over time as well. these agents that enterprises are starting to get more excited about. I mean, Tampa General and R1 seeing how like something like uh denial prevention rates, the ability to have uh agentic workflows where the data is immediately consumed and then the increase of the time for payout is up 200%.

>> Yep.

>> When you're talking to these customers that want to start implementing agents or at least the concept of agents, how important is the uh education of an ontology to these clients? M well I mean one of the things that is exciting to us is so many folks are excited about what Palenter is able to provide to their business that they're kind of there for the ontology right this makes intuitive sense if if you think about it from first principles if you're not just trying to procure a piece of software but you're actually trying to change how your business functions

>> it's sort of obvious that you have all these different disparate data sets and you need to get them into like one set of nouns and verbs for your business right

>> and what's really really exciting is folks also have started to understand that uh if you're going to have machines working alongside your people uh in the form of LLMs, they need a language that they can understand that humans can also understand. And I think the ontology is this incredibly uh powerful flywheel for that. Uh and so for most of our customers actually, they get it right and what we get to talk about with them is what is your hardest problem? How do we get into the weeds of this? What data do you have? Let's go get going. Let's build you something, you know, in the next week and ship it in the next day and ship it. Uh so I think there's a lot of that. The the thing that is uh very cool to see though is oftentimes it's like one person or a couple of people in an organization who are really tip of the spear on those efforts and are leading the charge and evangelizing inside their own organizations. And what is really cool about the way the Palenterer operates and that we try to operate as well is it's all show don't tell. We just go solve the problem demonstrate that we have and then all of a sudden everyone else in the organization gets excited about it too. It's really really cool to see. So I I think that leads into the next question of uh this concept of value creation. You wouldn't classify yourself as a pure consulting firm uh more of a software company. How do you define the way you guys get paid? Is it for the education? Is it for the implementation of the software? Is it for the ideation?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh it it is for building software that that's what we do. So I mean I think the the core of being a Ford deployed engineer at Palunteer, at North Slope or anywhere else uh there are very few places but anywhere else that does it in the in the way that we think about it. You have a problem and you have data.

>> Yes.

>> And then the job of the forward deployed engineer is to solve that problem with that data by shipping software. Yeah. And that's what we do. And what's really cool about Palenteer is they figured out a way to make that so incredibly powerfully fast and production scale secure and able to be federated out across a very complex organization. And that's why it's a joy to build on this platform. But what we do every time we show up with a customer is we start with the data. We start with the problem and we are there writing code and shipping software. Um, we're doing it all in Palunteer. We can do it way faster than we could if we were uh not able to leverage the product leverage of the platform.

>> AIF FTEE, this is something a lot of people are curious about. It's a, you know, I was talking to Unkid who I think is the lead on this uh 8 months ago and you know, it was really cool 5 months later. It's like in customers hands. You guys now are saying, "Hey, we're going to take this and take it to the next level." How is that process been implementing it for customers? Yeah, I mean I think that one one of the really exciting things working in the palentry ecosystem is there is so much product development. There's so much that gets shipped. Um and what's fun for us is we get to be the tip of the spear of that. The reason that's true is partly because we run our business on Palunteer, right?

>> Uh and so we are using the software every day for our own work uh and to make sure that we are running uh as like our own version of a category redefining company. You know, we think the future of services is software, right? And to do that we have to build ourselves our own software internally and aft makes us so much faster at doing that. One of the cool things for customers I think is also uh figuring out how to be engineers in this new era. Palunteer provides this incredible really wide range of tools that allow you to do engineering work from a variety of different backgrounds. If you want to be completely code first which many of the folks at NorthSlope are uh we have so many tools that we can use in the Palunteer platform that allow us to do that. AIFT opens up a whole new frontier both for those of us who write a lot of code and also for those who don't. Um, and you can ship things so much faster.

>> So, so, so an example of AID for a customer would be a someone who doesn't code, a natural language prompt that requires a lot of backend coding that traditionally an FTE would code up. Now, the AI is doing it.

>> I I would imagine it as, you know, you and I are working on a problem together and I'm an FTE and you're at a customer trying to solve a problem. uh you know to a large degree you still need uh a north slope person or a palunteer person around the hoop but uh there are a lot of problems and really exciting future for aft where like we can solve that problem together with the help of foundry acting as an agent on its own and we're really excited about that future and a lot of where you know we as north slope are trying to build our software direction uh is on how do we harness the power of that and build specific workflows for customers really really quickly and uh at very very high scale and so aft is this incredible jumping off point to be able to get that moving.

Are the customers open to trying these brand new things or are they a bit more hesitant?

>> Yeah, absolutely. Um and I you know it varies from organization to organization, but I think that most folks who we work with, they're they're all in. And that's the other that's a second thing that's really changed in the last year is folks are starting to understand that if you want to transform how your organization operates, you kind of have to do it full scale. Yeah. And you want to operate like an enterprise technology company that means the whole company needs to operate on AI. Yeah. And a FTE is this incredible mechanism for getting many many of those products into production much much faster.

What uh industries were is North Slope not only targeting but are you seeing kind of more broad-based success in?

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's it's very palenteer. I mean everybody has problems. Anyone who's trying to do something that is unique and specific in the world has a problem. It's an unsolved problem by definition. generic software

for customers across a huge variety of industries. Many of our customers are here, really exciting. Um, but I'd say that, you know, some of the things we're very proud of is we're helping uh healthcare institutions make sure that doctors are able to provide one much higher quality care for their patients by having more data around the quality they're providing and spend a lot less time on the paperwork around that quality. Uh we're also really proud that we're helping many different energy companies ship more energy onto the worldwide grid, especially clean energy, which has been very very cool,

>> which in the world of data centers is pretty important.

>> Exactly. Especially in the the era we're entering right now. Um we work with investment management firms, work with aviation companies, uh we work with consumer services companies, uh veterinary hospitals, things like that. How are these guys finding you?

>> Huge, huge swath. Uh well, people come to us because they love working with Palunteer and they want more, right? Uh, and I think one of the really exciting things for us is it it isn't I mean there's so much work to do in this space. There's so much momentum in the Palunteer ecosystem that folks are just trying to move even faster. Uh, and we're there to be that extra capacity. So, if you don't have a fully dedicated internal team or your team and the Palunteer team you're working with are already tied up building, you know, use cases 1 through 10, but you want to do 20, uh, that's usually when we get a call. Do you think there will be over the next decade thousands of these Palunteer derivative companies that are implementing it because is that's what exists for AWS and Google?

>> Yeah.

>> Um my my honest answer I'm I'm biased, right? Uh but my honest answer is I don't think so. I think there will be a small number of very good ones. Uh and we very much aspire to be one of those very good ones. Uh the reason I think that's true there's the same reason why a lot of Palunteer customers are uh themselves so unique like they are trying to build uh a an N of one company like that's why you work with Palunteer that's why we work with Palunteer we think that the traditional way of doing enterprise technology is wrong uh in most of corporate America and around the world and a lot of the customers we work with think that in their industry everyone else is getting it wrong and they want to build a compounding advantage that no one else can catch up to and I think that the the secret sauce for us is forward deployed engineering on the Palunteer platform means that we can be a software company. We can ship software as our output to our customers rather than having uh you know as as Dr. Karp describes it like a parasitic relationship with them. Uh and that's actually a very hard motion for a lot of traditional players to do. It's also very hard for a lot of you know uh single industry or single workflow SAS software companies to do as well. Uh and so I am very confident there are going to be others like us. We have a lot of friends who are working in this space uh who are sort of our friendly peers. There's so much work to do. Um but I do think it's a relatively small community and and the world is changing to a place where if if you start now uh especially if you're a customer who's here today, it's going to be really hard to catch you because you've got, you know, a two three fouryear head start on Palunteer. I mean, it's really difficult to go zero to one at the pace that you're going to be able to be accelerating away from everyone else.

>> Let me throw this last question at you, Bill, and thank you again for taking the time to do this. Thank you.

>> Um, lot of conversations right now about if AI is a bubble or if AI is hyped up and you are implementing on the ground floor AI at these companies every single day for your customers. How are you thinking of the concept of efficiency, margins, productivity, saving cost like is all this fake or is there something real happening in enterprise software?

>> Yeah, there is something real happening and also there's a lot of hype. Uh and I think one of the things that's unique about the space that we get to occupy all the folks who are in this room uh is there's a sifting that's happening where folks are trying to figure out how do I actually get the value out of this and what's cool about Palunteer is the AI is a mechanism right uh I think there's there's this metabolization of LLM into the ontology as like a way to get work done which is incredibly powerful but it is the ontology itself that enables that correct

>> and so I think there's a lot of hype uh AI is going to go take over the world. I actually think it will, but it requires doing it in like a production enterprise way, right?

>> And one of the things that I think a lot of uh there, you know, there's these LLM wrapper companies and, you know, software companies going after a single vertical. I think one of the things that Palunteer gets really right is it's still always about the specific problem that the company has that you're trying to solve. It's about the specific user who needs to be uh owning that outcome whether they are doing a workflow themselves or they're trusting an agent to do it

>> which creates a real use case.

>> Exactly. Exactly. And it's really really hard for anyone other than Palunteer to go compete on that because the amount of complex technology it takes to enable that is 20 years in the making.

>> Correct. Right.

>> Yeah.

I love it. Bill Ward, thank you for being here for me.

If anyone sees this and wants to get some pounder uh education from you, how can they reach out? uh reach out to us at northslope.com or hell@northslope.com is our email address. Uh and we would love to talk to you.

>> Thank you for the board. Appreciate it.

>> Take care.

>> All right. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the channel. We are here at Paler's end of year event Paragon and I'm here with Sid and Jeffrey from Crisis 24. Thank you guys for being here.

>> Thank you very much.

>> Thank you very much. So your partnership with Paler actually happened about 3 years ago. Uh I started making content around the company back in basically 2021 2022 when the partnership was announced and it was one of the more interesting partnerships that came out during that time. No one really cared about Palanteer. No one knew about Palanteer. So every press release would be like immediately dissected. So I just want to give you the floor real quick. Uh you can introduce yourself what you do at Crisis 24 and what is Crisis 2024 or 24.

>> Sure. Well thanks for having us. We really appreciate it. Crisis 24 is uh a company really premised on how do we allow the most uh distinguished organizations and individuals that operate? How do we allow them to do what they do anywhere in the world with confidence without having to worry about things that in today's increasingly uncertain world they may have to, right? Their physical security, their health security, their cyber security, all those sorts of things. As Crisis 24, we bring solutions for to allow our clients to do what they do best, which is their business, right? Or their family. And that's where I think it's been really interesting to see uh where the company has been and where it's going because we really look at ourselves as being instrumental to that fabric of where uh companies and individuals are going these days.

>> Right. Jeffrey.

>> Great. Yeah. Um so my role is I uh lead ya uh which is the part of crisis 24 uh that is actually a partnership with palunteer right

>> um and so a is really focused on uh how do we use AI and AI tools uh to bring enterprise solutions uh to the market. Our first product uh the presidential brief uh modeled after the intelligence report that the president of the United States gets uh every day uh looks at and uh uh takes all the data points of all the geopolitical and geoeconomical uh issues uh that exist around the world uh and look to do a prioritization that understands why something should be important to a key executive. uh but not just uh a prioritization but an impact uh assessment using standard analytical techniques uh developed in the tradecraft of the intelligence community uh to help the decision maker uh move from reactive decisioning to proactive decisioning.

>> Yeah. And the reason I thought this was so interesting uh even 3 years ago was because Palier is all about datadriven decision-m right? How do you gather insights from the data and then effectively make the decision at scale? So I guess we'll get started with this question. um executives that get this presidential brief I think is a very interesting concept and you guys call it this IO report. What exactly does Pounder's role I guess through Foundry or the ontology play with making this thing real for executives?

>> Yeah. Well, it's a great question and Jeffrey will expand upon this, but I think the key is uh leveraging the the Foundry platform where literally billions of pieces of information are coming together and they're being ingested, they're being structured, and they're being analyzed and that is the foundation and what we do with uh a crisis 24 is we bring intelligence tradecraftraft and security tradecraftraft to that. So with proprietary intelligence frameworks um and and security uh uh kind of apparatus we're able to take that information and put it in a structure which the intelligence community normally would analyze and structure information such that it becomes not just um interesting information but it becomes uh reactionary information that you can look at and then be able to decipher not just key insights but key actionable decisions to be taken. And so this would be like a CEO getting an update on their supply chain and immediately realizing something needs to be done if something's not going well.

>> Correct. Absolutely.

>> Yes. And um

>> put the mic a little bit closer.

>> Oh, of course. Yeah. So, um the uh the key is is being able to have all of the different uh bits of information combined and and we do that through ingesting uh all kinds of different data points. Everything from weather uh political unrest um to uh you know economic reports,

>> right? Um and and and we wouldn't be able to do that all in real time uh if it wasn't for both uh the foundry and AIP platforms. Um and uh the ability for uh something that would have happened to take weeks uh or uh you know to to analyze and understand the impact uh now happens in real time. uh which is a really interesting opportunity because if you think about uh what's happened in enterprise software for the last 20 years a lot of it has been focused on uh the business operations uh understanding you know everything from accounting to payroll to ERP systems uh sales uh systems uh de development systems really focuses on increasing the level of fidelity that an executive can know about their business and IA really uh uh aims to reshape uh what we can think about is the world external to a business and making uh structured understanding of everything from supply chain uh to a trader uh insurance healthcare uh finding those use cases uh as we start to apply uh all of the work that we've done to launch TPB uh or the presidential uh brief uh will be reused as we launch new products around new use cases uh leveraging that same concept of creating structure out of the noise uh that exists AC with all of the global data uh that is available to us on the uh Foundry platform.

>> And I would maybe add um to that it's it's really giving um those the executive suite comfort and confidence.

>> Yeah.

>> And in the ability to take decisions because not only are they uh coming from an AIdriven uh mechanism and coming from something as trusted as the the Palunteer Foundry platform, but they are referencable. You can you can see where information comes. It's it's attributable to specific sources. So it's not just finger in the winding it and a black box, but it's actually attributable and uh analyzable. I would give a a story maybe or a case in point. Uh I think one interesting way of understanding what the capability is um is just think of a a global manufacturing company. They're in a situation where they're sourcing materials from different parts in the world and there might be a rare earth set of materials that they source from only a certain place in the world. And rare earths have become very rare the past couple of years.

>> And put a situation for instance uh you know before the the invasion of Ukraine happened. A lot of rare earths are found in Ukraine

>> and there are manufacturing companies that were sourcing there. Just think if there was the intelligence to take uh security intelligence information on troop formations where where uh troops were massing, where they were training, weather information otherwise where there was a ability to really maybe even uh forecast a a risk probability of an invasion in Ukraine by Russia. Supply chains could have been adjusted in advance to prevent disruptions, right? And um this is where the offering with pounder is really unique because with the IA platform the AI intelligence comes every morning to the intellig to the uh seauite where they can be able to look at that and really have key decisions and option sets presented in front of them.

>> And this intelligence is coming from all the data inside the company.

>> It's it's proprietary but it's also pulling from 40,000 open source data sources around the world. So it's coming from multiple language sources and it's all translatable but all referenceable. But then just taking that information and then there uh AI generated um intelligence uh option options that are presented and what the the user can do is leverage that with their own internal intelligence teams. Correct. But they can also then leverage it to call in and crisis 24 has 230 uh intelligence analysts on staff that cover every country in the world across multiple vectors. So being able to say, "Oh my gosh, I see a potential disruption happening in Ukraine. call crisis 24, can I get the Ukraine desk? You get the lead of the Ukraine desk and you talk to that person who's a specialist in that country. And then even beyond that, we have assets in situ in Ukraine and other parts around the world. So you can even take it one step further and get that proprietary intelligence to feed a business decision. Right. So it's it's really seeing around corners and being able to take threats and turn them into opportunities for a business. And you guys would classify yourself as a SAS company that essentially uh provides this offering and the reason customers pay you guys is because the intelligence via the ontology to even understand and contextualize the necessity to call someone in Ukraine is where the value kind of lies. Yeah, I think it's important to understand that um whether it's SAS or AI, you know, I think I I think the the key piece is is that it's not just the technology and I think Sid was alluded alluding to that uh because as as business uh as business leaders make decisions, trust is a really important equation. Correct. And to be able to uh understand everything from the sourcing uh to be able to look at uh multiple languages uh to be able to uh use those standard uh analytical uh techniques uh developed in in in in the intelligence tradecraft uh it it goes beyond just the digital uh but as Sid alluded to and is talking about uh it really is about how can we also merge that with the human component as well. Uh and what we're seeing is interesting uh what's happening and is those uh those people who in the past were creating those reports um are now uh joining the decision-m team because it's more about the impact of and the uh strategic reaction to uh and uh identifying more opportunities uh like the situation in Ukraine where they can make incremental decisions and those val the decision is is is is ever more valuable when you can actually take an action to either prevent accelerate right or uh change course.

>> Yeah, it really is amazing because I think this this solution and this partnership with Palunteer is so transformational is because in this world where it is more uncertain but it also there's so much more noise out there and getting clarity

>> getting signal through the noise

>> and signal with it from the noise is key and that's what I think this partnership enables and specifically that is even more differentiating in the business world today than it ever has been in the past.

>> Agreed. uh what risks are there to this intelligence briefing as a product and as a like s a core software offering that it's pulling from all this open source data like could the data be bad could the data be mistransated how do you think of risks and then the company's prevention mechanism for or mitigation mechanis mechanism for those risks

>> yeah I think it's um it's it's it's interesting right I mean there's a couple of different things that uh come to mind uh first of all um one of the things that we leverage from the trade craft of the intelligence community uh is uh the standards ICD ICD 206 and 203 uh which basically looks at and understands uh how do we remove bias right uh so whether we call a uh country's leadership a regime uh you know has specific consequences uh and how do we remove that so it's about what's happening and the decision um so uh also I think as we start to think about uh how uh a tool is only as good as as what you put into it. Um so trust as we talked about before is really important. Uh but if you start to think about like the chatbot, you know, what is the impact of X on my business uh is only as good as uh knowing the business. And so where we're seeing is the opportunity to extend and understand both strategic growth uh key risks uh and problems uh supply chains uh being able to ingest that information uh in a trustbased platform uh really allows us to actually uh enable that decision maker with the type of information they need uh to see uh accelerated outcomes.

>> Right. And and I would also add to what Jeffrey said that that uh ability to pressure test what the AI produces really comes from in a lot of our cases our clients actually have internal intelligence teams which can be a veter. Yeah.

>> And then at the same time we have our 230 analysts that are trained in this and they also vet such that there's almost a um a a good seal of approval test that has to happen before it really goes right

>> to press.

This has been awesome. Last question for you both Sid Jeffrey. Thank you guys for taking the time to do this. Um, we've been talking a little bit about AI, but I'm curious about your perspectives. Past three years, AI has taken over the world. Palunteer has become one of the largest AI companies. Um, how is AI operationalizing your business? How are LLMs, are you using LM? Are you orchestrating LM? What is what does it mean for you guys to be an AI first company?

>> It's a great question. We think about a how we can make AI first in everything we do. And so it really is at the core of every process. Not that just we we use internally but because we use internally we look to put it in our externally facing products. And so it really is something that uh we see as a force multiplier for how we can take what we do and expand that amongst our our client base.

>> Yeah. And I think uh one of the things we talk about as a team often is uh we have an AI enabled product uh but what does it mean to be an AI company, right? And uh you know with the pace of change of everything there's so many different ways that AI is touching business and uh from our perspective what makes it interesting is how quickly can we embed uh what is uh in the market so that we are consumers at the same time. Um but as we think about the product uh you know with mo uh with many models out there and every day there seems to be a new update to one of them uh what we're finding is is that the the capabilities of each model change uh from from company to company. And so where we might have something work with us to write a report um then we might work with another model to QA the uh the report. Um and so um you know in that I think that that's a good example of how we see uh AI impacting our business.

Jeffrey Sid, thank you guys so much. Pleas deeply appreciate it.

>> Pleasure.

Crisis 24 and Pounder at Paragon.

>> All right. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the channel. We are here at Pounder's end of year event called Paragon. I'm here with Steve who is the president and CEO of Cubic Corporation. Steve, thanks for being here.

>> Hey, thanks for having me. Nice to be here. The thing about this event that is super cool, I think, is that customers are showing real use cases and showing the partnerships that they're engaging in. Uh for those that don't know what Cubic Corporation does, if you can give a little bit of a background about what it is and then we'll get into the use cases in the press release that you guys announced today with Pounder.

>> Yeah, sure. Yeah. Uh Cubic is a diversified transportation and defense company. We uh kind of refer to it as we operate at the intersection of technology and the government and we really focus on critical customer use cases.

>> Yeah. The uh interesting thing as well about the press release that I was reading today is that the intersection around technology and government is also really not easy to explore. I mean Pounder's entire history started with providing technology to the government and those use cases ended up being somewhat valuable and they turned into the company they are today. So I guess what is the core thesis of the collaboration with Pounder and how has that expanded into the use cases that you've seen value in?

>> Yeah, you know, our our um our partnership with with Palunteer is uh is one that's leveraging the unique capabilities of both companies primarily to respond to the Department of War's rally cry to prioritize speed and innovation.

>> Right. And um you know if you look at there's really two use cases that we're focused on. One is around the supply chain. Supply chains are antiquated. They're not set up really to scale to support uh the Department of of War's needs, especially if they do need a a serious ramp up. And uh so we're working with Palunteer. We're going to be utilizing their um supply chain optimization software. We're going to integrate that into our production environment, completely transform our supply chain. It's it's really an attempt to unlock all the data that sits in our disparant systems

>> to drive cycle time reductions to provide real-time visibility into the status and health of our supply base, but ultimately to increase our capacity and ability to go faster. So that that hits the speed and innovation piece, and that's really around the supply chain. Can you speak a little bit to the uh kind of core software offering of the ontology at the intersection of your business and why you guys thought that over the other software providers made more sense for what you guys are doing?

Yeah, you know, I I think uh you know, Cubic is a company that's been around for 70 years and

>> and uh we've grew and expanded through a lot of acquisitions. And so, as you can imagine, what what what we have today is a lot of different systems that don't talk well to each other,

>> right? And so to stitch it all together, a lot of manual effort, uh, a lot of offline spreadsheets. And you as we started talking to Palunteer, um, you know, what we saw was an opportunity to almost clean sheet the way we do our supply chain. So we see it as not as a kind of an overlay. I mean, it'll it'll start off more like an overlay to stitch our systems together, but I think over time as we start to really get into the ontology, we're going to see that we'll probably want to clean sheet it around it and then get rid of all the systems and leverage the capability that way.

>> Yeah. Yeah, and I think that the sort of symbiotic relationship between Palunteer and other companies is if you can clean all the data, you know, something that Paler says a lot is that the data doesn't have to be clean in the beginning, but it just has to have the ambition to have the use cases evolve from the ontologization of the data, having all the data come in one place and that really does tend to replace a lot of other parts of the software stack.

>> Yeah. Look, our I know our data is not clean, but that doesn't matter what we can actually use the system to clean the data. So that's that's the way to look at it,

>> right? Um the defense space, Department of War, we have a new administration. They have a different paradmatic approach about how they think of defense. How do you as a CEO think about positioning Cubic uh for this rallying cry that you've said the Department of War is caring about?

>> Yeah, I I'll give you one specific use case which is relevant to our our our our partnership with with with Palunteer. We've been a a longtime provider to Department of War and specifically the US Army of their tactical edge computing and networking equipment.

>> Right?

>> So, think of that as you're deployed and you need to be able to set up command and communication on the battlefield. We do that. That's what we do. Um but if you think about you know what the future looks like uh and this opportunity around an AI enabled battlefield and you know what does that mean? How do you take the decision time from days, weeks, months and make it in seconds? How do you improve the quality decision?

>> That's where hardware and software come together. So we're a hardware provider in this particular use case and Palunteer is a software provider. And so merging those capabilities into the next generation systems for the army is is is what we're focused on. And that's a key part of the partnership is how do we leverage the software that they're building that's going to reduce decision time and quality with the network and computing horsepower that we're providing in our next generation products. And when you say at the edge, I would imagine you need a software partner that can actually operate at the edge to make this work.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's uh for us, I look at it as um um being a a hardware provider, we're sort of agnostic to to to software.

>> Um

>> what we're trying to do is help the army or the department of war in any case um operate in a completely disconnected environment. So, you know, an imperfect environment is one where um data doesn't flow from satellites or drones to the soldier. So, how do you get that data to the soldier, right? And you can do that through software solutions and you can do that through merging software and hardware and putting it out in a modular use case where the soldier can actually be forward deployed not connected. Yes. but at the next opportunity to get the the full connection of the so that's a software hardware combination and that's that's how we're trying to solve those problems.

Steve, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Last question for you. Uh this administration and particularly the defense part of this administration has really embraced AI and they've said that we are going to be on the cutting edge of AI. We want to win when it comes to the adversarial nations that are also embracing AI. How are you as a CEO philosophically thinking about AI and at the intersection of defense? Yeah, I look I I I we think we're uh probably two years ago I would have a hard time articulating what percentage of our technology investment was in AI and now I would say almost all of it is. So it's it's it's it's really around for us we think that we have to move in that that direction quickly. Um so we're we're embracing it. uh we're looking for use cases that can be deployed quickly to provide uh immediate benefit and then uh iterating collaboratively with the customers with partners like Palunteer to make those improvements. And so for us it's it's you know taking advantage of commercially available software and hard hardware and deploying it in a rapid iteration environment. That's how we're trying to bring the AI technologies to the market. Steve, thank you so much for your time.

>> Great talking to you.

>> All right. Hello everybody. We are at Palanter's end of year December event called Paragon. I'm here today from Kavanaaugh Corporation. Joe and their echo Jesse from Palanteer. Thank you guys for doing this.

>> Happy.

>> Thanks for having us. Yeah.

>> So Joe, let's get started. We did a little bit of a small interview back at the AIPCON number five. Uh, a lot has changed since then and given the presentation that I just saw an hour ago, seems like a lot has changed in the positive sense. What has happened since you guys first started working with Palunteer?

>> Yeah, well, we spent a lot of time up front kind of building out our core ontology, the foundational ontology we call it, and you know, just recently, as we saw there, we're just rolling out more and more tools at kind of an exponential rate just because we have that clean ontology now. We're just able to build tools really, really quickly. And can you give the audience a little bit of background about what Kavanaaugh does and kind of what was even the the philosophical reason to begin working with pounder a year ago?

>> Well, yeah, we're we're just a heavy civil construction company in Ottawa, Canada. You know, like 500 big excavators, shovels, trucks on the road every day. And uh we just so happened to stumble into a boot camp Palunteer was putting on and we saw it and we just went, "My god, they've done it." Because we we're trying to connect their data and you know, in construction, it's Groundhog Day every day. Yep. And so we were kind of sick of the status quo and I was always the PowerBI guy, the VLOOKUP guy. And as soon as I saw that ontology objects being connected, you know, there's a boot camp about our trucks and I was like, "Oh my god, they've done it. This is now my life. We have to we have to make this work."

I love it. Jesse, you've been their Echo. Can you explain to uh the audience what exactly an Echko does and how have you seen their progression as a early customer?

>> Sure. So I was there at the the first boot camp that we ran. Um, so the deployment strategist role is a technical role at Palanteer where you engage deeply with a customer to understand their problems, feel their pain, and help build the solutions that they need and possibly solutions that they don't know they need yet to really help drive that goal forward. Um, and so what we first started out with was just kind of a simple problem of, hey, the data is fractured. It's in different places. Uh, we started with this idea of just wouldn't it be nice if when dispatch was working in the morning, they knew what trucks were out for repair. Just something simple like that. And right from there as along with just kind of the the job costing idea of like hey when I submit something can I just see if it's gotten through the process yet like look at the approval stages understand that so I can start to plan tomorrow. From those humble beginnings we've now rolled out 40 workflows in a year stretching everything from safety dispatch estimating built them an HRMS system an OSDK app which is crazy. We uh we started that we just didn't know how hard it was going to be and just flew through it. So it's it's on his phone now.

Okay. So obviously the rate of growth is exponential. You said 97% of the the companies using Pounder uh daily. You also said that it's kind of replaced pretty much every other software stack that you guys have. Uh why has the rate of growth been so exponential on Pounder?

>> I think because we're making people's lives easier. Like the main goal is giving operations the tools that they need to do their work dayto-day. And so when you show up and the tools easier, the adoption is just easy, right? The adoption. You want when people get the tools to go, "Oh yeah, that's exactly what I needed." And this is easier. We're trying to make people's lives easier. That's the main goal. 100%. A

as a construction company, I mean, you named a couple of different use cases, but uh to the audience that maybe has never worked in a construction company or even understands the challenges, can you can you give us some examples of what is so difficult about using an Excel sheet to manage something versus having it on Foundry?

>> Yeah. It's just the the connectivity, right? Like it's the for a construction analogy, we call it double handling material. Like if you dig a hole and fill it back in, that's, you know, that's inefficient. So data is no different. If you fill in a spreadsheet and you have data somewhere and someone has to look at that data and then retype it in somewhere else, it's inefficient. So we kind of see it the exact same way. So spreadsheets are inherently inefficient because they're not interconnected with the rest of your business,

>> right? Um Jesse, I was just talking to Kevin who leads sales at Hounder and and uh he was referencing Kavanaaugh and said that, you know, Kavanagh is not just running on Pounder Foundry. Kavanaaugh is running on Kavanaaugh's operating system that is powered by Foundry. Can you speak a little bit to uh a company making an operating system versus a company just plugging stuff into your operating system?

>> Yeah, I think part of that is that this is the core philosophy of Palunteer is that we meet the customer where they are and build software that meets their business needs as opposed to saying, "Hey, cut the awkward parts off of your business to meet this kind of cut cookie cutter mold." which which is a difficult conversation sometimes with

>> business. It's definitely a difficult conversation but I think where we started with was just the core operations of hey what is a construction company at its core? It's a company that takes labor materials and equipment and works against the contract. And so we said great we're going to build something that lets you manage all of these pieces and then from there we'll spring all of the other things that interact between them. What is you know a dispatch other than putting a person in a truck against a job? And so from there, you kind of start at the core and build out from there as opposed to maybe tacking like one workflow and then trying to work down to the ontology.

>> Absolutely.

Last question for you guys. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Um the partnership here I think is really special because Dr. Karp doesn't even, you know, mention you guys as a customer. He mentions you guys as a partner. Um obviously the FTE model is starting to get more adopted into the enterprise. Now everyone wants a Ford deployed engineer. How are you thinking of the partnership with Palunteer versus the sort of transactional vendor relationship with a software company?

>> Yeah, I we feel like we are partners. Like Jesse and I have a great relationship where we were literally locked in, we called it the training room, but we were locked in a room for 3 months whiteboarding. What is construction?

>> Wow.

>> There was no pizza or beer at all. Um but I think just that trust, right? Like Jesse challenged us a lot on just the assumptions we didn't even know we were making. Like I like to think I get to first principles and you know I'm unbiased but you know there's so many instances where Jesse would just well again phil philosophically go why and you go well crap I didn't know I was making that assumption. So I think it's just trust right like trust that they're they're there with your best interest in mind and they're going to tell you the truth whether you want to hear it or not.

Same question to you Jesse. Yeah, I mean I think the partnership is, you know, as we move forward, right, I wish I could work on Kavanaaugh forever, right? Like, uh, I love the work that we've done there. And when we when we started this this journey together, I didn't know too much about construction. And so I started by saying like I'm probably going to ask some really stupid questions here like why do you bother doing costing, right? Or like why do why do you care about dispatch or how does estimating work? But I want you to trust that like I'm only going to push when I really don't think it makes sense. And I'm going to learn this from you. And like if you trust me that I have your best interest in mind and that I'm the expert in the software, I'm going to trust that you have like this partnership's best interest in mind and you're the expert on your business. And together we're going to revolutionize construction.

I love it. Joe, Jesse, thank you for the time. Appreciate you guys.