Earnings Call Transcript - PLTR Q3 2023

Ana Soro, Finance Team Member

Good morning. I'm Ana Soro from Palantir’s finance team, and I'd like to welcome you to our Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. We'll be discussing the results announced in our press release issued before the market opened and posted on our Investor Relations website. During the call, we will make statements regarding our business that may be considered forward-looking within applicable securities laws, including statements regarding our fourth quarter and fiscal 2023 results. Management's expectations for our future financial and operational performance and other statements regarding our plans, prospects and expectations. These statements are not promises or guarantees and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause them to differ materially from actual results. Information concerning those risks is available in our earnings press release distributed before the market opened today, and in our SEC filings. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Further, during the course of today's call, we will refer to certain adjusted financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, or in isolation from GAAP measures. Additional information about these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliation of non-GAAP to comparable GAAP measures, is included in our press release and investor presentation provided today. Our press release, investor presentation and SEC filings are available on our Investor Relations website at investors.palantir.com. Over the course of the call, we will refer to various growth rates when discussing our business. These rates reflect year-over-year comparisons unless otherwise stated. Joining me on today's call are Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer; Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer; Dave Glazer, Chief Financial Officer; and Ryan Taylor, Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Legal Officer. I'll now turn it over to Ryan to start the call.

Ryan Taylor, Chief Revenue Officer

We are pleased to report that our company achieved GAAP profitability for the fourth consecutive quarter, and we continue to drive strong results across our company. In Q3, we closed 80 deals of $1 million or more across 30 industries, 29 deals of $5 million or more across 16 industries, and 12 deals of $10 million or more across 11 industries. Our U.S. commercial business accelerated last quarter, growing 33% year-over-year. Excluding strategic commercial contracts, it grew 52% year-over-year and 19% sequentially, and three-fourths of our quarter-over-quarter growth is from customers that started with us in 2023. Our U.S. commercial customer count rose 12% quarter-over-quarter and is now ten-fold what it was just three years ago. Deal count for our U.S. commercial business is 2.4 times what it was in Q3 of last year and U.S. commercial TCV closed at $252 million, up 55% year-over-year on a dollar-weighted duration basis. We're also seeing the acceleration of larger deals and shorter times to conversion and expansion, including a multi-year deal in excess of $40 million with one of the largest home construction companies in the U.S. to start up pilot and converted all within Q3. This growth is in part due to AIP's continued transformation of the way we partner with and deliver value for our customers, and we expect AIP's impact to continue to intensify. The rapid expansion of AIP at both our existing and new customers, and the impact it is having on their operations is nothing short of remarkable. In the last quarter, we reoriented our go-to-market approach around AIP boot camps, which has allowed us to deliver real workflows on actual customer data in five days or less versus our traditional pilots, which generally take one to three months. We're seeing different stakeholders at the table, including tangible engagement from IT, a quicker time to value for customers, a wider range of organizations partnering with us, and the ability to have multi-organization boot camps. Early indications point to vast improvements on our unit economics from initial contact to customer conversion, all while accelerating new customer negotiations. Boot camps are also driving contract expansions. We're on track to conduct boot camps for more than 140 organizations by the end of November, nearly half of those are taking place this month alone, which is more than the number of U.S. commercial pilots we conducted all of last year. In these boot camps, our customers tackle problems that have an immediate impact and learn how to deploy AI into their unique operating environment in a matter of days. Our customers' results speak for themselves. One attendee said that we achieved more in one day for them with AIP than one of the top three hyperscalers had accomplished over the last four months, and then presented their work with Palantir instead of the hyperscaler to the CEO the very next day. Another attendee said, we basically built ten times faster with three times fewer resources, and yet another claimed, we have built in a day what they wouldn't be able to get internally in months, and then it probably still wouldn't meet the requirements. AIP is being used for a multitude of workflows at customers across the globe. Just a few examples include the following: our partners in the healthcare space, including Tampa General, HCA, and Cleveland Clinic, are using AIP for dynamic scheduling, turning software from a place of data entry into a provider of operating leverage. Aramark is using AI to procure more efficiently, generating custom proactive negotiating strategies. Panasonic North America is using AIP to scale its workforce and accelerate how quickly new engineers can level up. Eaton is using AIP to more efficiently deploy fixes by identifying available materials across different plants or assembly patterns. Carrefour Brazil is increasing the fill rate of online grocery orders with higher accuracy. The energy and engagement around AIP is unlike anything we've ever seen. The potential market for AIP and the trajectory of possible AIP growth for our business is massive. We almost tripled the number of AIP users last quarter and nearly 300 distinct organizations have used AIP since our launch just five months ago. We will continue investing meaningfully in boot camps as our go-to-market strategy for AIP. Through all of this, we never forget that we are a company built on a foundation of counterterrorism. In response to recent world events, we continue to be dedicated to our founding principles of supporting the most important missions in the world, including providing intelligence and defense capabilities to global allies. In that vein, our impact has never been more compelling. We have the products now that the world needs. We expect our U.S. government business to reaccelerate beyond the current growth rate of 10% year-over-year, given increasing demand for those products to support our allies around the world. While we continue to expect near-term uncertainty given budgetary environments, we were encouraged by the pickup in activity at the end of the U.S. government fiscal year, and we feel well positioned for long-term growth through our evolving strategy, which Shyam will speak to further. Just several weeks ago, it was announced that the Army awarded us a new contract worth up to $250 million over three years to provide additional capabilities in support of Combatant Commands, armed services, intelligence community, and special forces as they continue to test, utilize and scale AI and ML capabilities. As we enter the final months of the year, we are steadfast in our focus on AI and unlocking the impact it can have for our customers. We look forward to continued business momentum through year-end and are excited for the opportunities to continue delivering unmatched impact for our customers into the new year. I'll now turn it over to Shyam.

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer

Thanks, Ryan. At AIPCon 2, this past September, I unpacked some of the foundational engineering challenges that we've solved to deploy LLMs that are anchored in your data on your private network and to safely orchestrate your enterprise with tools, actions, and other AI models. The core concept of the KLLM kernel enables you to reliably harness LLMs for critical workflows to manage the risks in the underlying models changing out from underneath you and to create the shortest and safest path to put your own fine-tuned models into production. Why use one LLM when you can use K? The art is in synthesizing the outputs from this committee of experts to create a rich topology of answers to the prompt. LLMs are statistics, not calculus. It's more like predicting the weather than predicting an eclipse. And that's why we're focused on proof, not proofs of concept. AIP gives our customers the infrastructure they actually need to ship production use cases quickly. This difference has been so profound that we shifted the entire commercial organization to focus on one to five-day long customer boot camps, where organizations exit with a scalable use case on their actual data that they built for themselves. Customers leave so excited with this definite optimistic view of what can be accomplished, and how they'll drive transformation in their organizations. And these boot camps have created enormous tailwinds with IT attendees for two reasons. First, we're defining the most advanced and valuable reference architecture for generative AI in the enterprise. And second, with the release of virtual tables and Foundry, IT's primary objection of data duplication is eliminated. We're running more boot camps per month than we had U.S. commercial pilots all last year. These boot camps really allow the customer to experience three magic moments for themselves. First, that you really can't use LLMs without tools. That elegant integration of algorithmic reasoning unlocks the full potential. Second, that the object, in other words, the rich representation of your enterprise and its state and not chat is the prompt, or said differently, the boot camp experience enables them to transcend chat. And finally, the power of live integration of expert feedback through the AIP infrastructure to efficiently generate adaptive models. At the end of the boot camp, customers say things like, once you see it, you can't unsee it. As Ryan mentioned, it's common to hear attendees express that they could do in days what they couldn't previously with other AI technologies in months. In September, we also launched Palantir Government Web Services to expand Palantir's mission by supporting and growing today's nascent but inspiring defense tech ecosystem. Through Palantir GWS, we're providing emerging and existing companies in the defense industrial base with the enabling software to quickly operationalize their mission-critical capabilities at scale, all aimed at minimizing the time to market and bringing the best of America's greatest advantage software to the fight. FedStart and Apollo are the first offerings in GWS. FedStart’s platform accreditation as a service offering radically compresses the timeline and cost of unlocking advanced markets and beyond. Apollo's autonomous software delivery platform is the most technically mature and sophisticated approach to continuously delivering complex modern software to the thousands of edge environments required to deter and defeat threats in the Pacific. FedStart customers like CalypsoAI and PrimerAI and Apollo customers like Lockheed shared their acceleration journeys at our software for government conference hosted in our DC offices in September. The reaction to Palantir GWS has been amazing. Venture capitalists, defense tech entrepreneurs and government project managers are responding to the investments in a big tent ecosystem and the efficiency and scale that we're providing. We also launched our mixed reality service and immersive command and control application, an application that was built on the mixed reality service at the Army's AUSA Conference in October. It was met with rave reviews. Our immersive C2 application showed how command and control could be done on the move in the back of a vehicle, leveraging mixed-reality headsets built on GWS infrastructure. And our mixed reality service will mean that any application that builds on or integrates with GWS can instantly enable their own mixed reality offering. Finally, our products could not be playing a more central role for real-world events. It's incredibly rewarding to see the products that we've built over the last 20 years meet their moments, often in new and impactful ways. From MetaConstellation, which is enabling tactical overhead imagery in the field to guide for mission planning, to even Foundry for complex video imagery and audio analysis and automation. From the mission data platform and its real-time cross-domain collaboration across allied nations to MAVERICK for target effect repairing and advanced fires execution. These real-world events validate the investments that we have made over the last five years, and strengthens our conviction in what we are building now for the future. And with that, I'll hand it over to Dave to talk us through the financials.

David Glazer, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Shyam. We had an exceptional quarter. Revenue growth reaccelerated on the back of our U.S. commercial business, driven by our intense focus on AIP, while margins continue to expand, demonstrating the transforming unit economics of our business. We beat the high end of our guidance range on both the top line and bottom line and increased our Rule of 40 score by 800 basis points quarter-over-quarter to 46, while simultaneously delivering our fourth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability, the first time ever that we are GAAP profitable on a trailing 12-month basis. We also delivered our third consecutive quarter of GAAP operating profit and over $0.5 billion in adjusted free cash flow over the last four quarters. Turning to our global top line results. Third quarter revenue reaccelerated to $558 million, up 17% year-over-year and 5% sequentially, exceeding the high end of the range of our prior guidance. Excluding the impact of revenue from strategic commercial contracts, third quarter revenue grew 21% year-over-year and 6% sequentially. Revenue from our largest customers continues to expand. Trailing 12-month revenue per customer from our top 20 customers increased 13% year-over-year to $54 million per customer. Customer count grew 34% year-over-year and 8% sequentially to 453 customers as we remain focused on landing new accounts. Now moving to our commercial segment. Third quarter commercial revenue grew 23% year-over-year and 8% sequentially to $251 million. I'd like to congratulate the entire commercial organization for reaching a $1 billion annualized run rate milestone this quarter. It's quite an achievement. Excluding the impact from strategic commercial contracts, commercial revenue grew 34% year-over-year and 11% sequentially. In the third quarter, U.S. commercial revenue reaccelerated to $116 million, up 33% year-over-year and 13% sequentially. Excluding revenue from strategic commercial contracts, U.S. commercial revenue grew 52% year-over-year and 19% sequentially. We continue to see the impact of our intense focus on AIP on our commercial business, both through the adoption of new customers and the expansion of opportunities at existing customers. We booked $252 million of U.S. commercial TCV, representing growth of 55% year-over-year on a dollar-weighted duration basis. Our U.S. commercial customer count grew to 181 customers, reflecting 37% growth year-over-year and 12% sequentially, benefiting from the increase in velocity of our AIP go-to-market motion. This represents a ten-fold increase in U.S. commercial customer count from when we went public just three years ago. Our international commercial business was up 15% year-over-year and 4% sequentially to $134 million as we continue to capitalize on targeted growth opportunities in Asia, the Middle East and beyond, while conditions remain challenging in Continental Europe. Revenue from strategic commercial contracts was $15 million or 2.6% of quarterly revenue, down from $19 million in the prior quarter. We anticipate fourth quarter revenue from these customers to continue to decline to between $13 million to $15 million, representing 2.3% of expected fourth quarter revenue. Shifting to our Government segment. Third quarter government revenue grew 12% year-over-year and 2% sequentially to $308 million. U.S. government revenue grew 10% year-over-year and 2% sequentially to $229 million. While it's hard to predict exactly when our government revenue will reconverge at historically high CAGRs, as Shyam mentioned, our products, PG, GAIA, MetaConstellation and AIP are needed in battlefields across the world and even more so in the current geopolitical landscape. International government revenue grew 21% year-over-year and 2% sequentially to $78 million, bolstered by our continued work in healthcare and defense. Moving to bookings. TCV booked was $830 million, up 29% sequentially. Net dollar retention was 107%, impacted primarily by headwinds from our commercial business in Continental Europe. Net dollar retention does not include revenue from new customers that we acquired in the past 12 months and is, therefore, not reflective of the recent acceleration in our U.S. commercial business. We ended the third quarter with $3.7 billion in total remaining deal value and $988 million in remaining performance obligations. As a reminder, remaining performance obligations are primarily comprised of our commercial business as it does not take into account contracts with an initial term of less than 12 months and contractual obligations that fall beyond termination for convenience clauses, both of which are common in most of our government business. Our U.S. commercial business saw total remaining deal value growth of 23% year-over-year and 27% sequentially when excluding the impact from strategic commercial contracts highlighting the acceleration of our go-to-market motion. Turning to margin and expense. Adjusted gross margin, which excludes stock-based compensation expense, was 82% for the quarter. Adjusted income from operations, which excludes stock-based compensation expense and related employer payroll taxes, was $163 million, representing an adjusted operating margin of 29%, 400 basis points ahead of the high end of our prior guidance, and marking the fourth consecutive quarter of expanding adjusted operating margins. Q3 adjusted expense was $395 million, down 1% sequentially and flat year-over-year. In short, we've been able to flatline expenses for four consecutive quarters while investing significantly in our products, including AIP and reaccelerating our revenue. This drives home the efficiency and operating leverage of our software at scale. R&D adjusted expense was up 9% year-over-year and 11% sequentially, demonstrating our commitment to continuously drive forward product innovation and invest in technical talent. Over the past year, we have emphasized our unwavering dedication to sustain GAAP profitability and GAAP operating income. Our four consecutive quarters of improving GAAP operating income enable us to more aggressively invest in AIP. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter and beyond, we remain focused on calibrating expense growth below revenue growth, even as we increase investment and resourcing to AIP and in specific geographies around the world. In the third quarter, we generated GAAP operating income of $40 million, our third consecutive quarter of GAAP operating income. We also generated GAAP net income of $72 million, representing a 13% margin, our fourth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability. This is the first time we've ever achieved both GAAP net income and GAAP operating profitability on a trailing 12-month basis. While we continue to manage our stock-based compensation expense, as I mentioned in previous quarters, we expect it to trend up in Q4 as we continue to invest in AIP. Third quarter adjusted earnings per share was $0.07 and GAAP earnings per share was $0.03. Additionally, our combined revenue growth and adjusted operating margin accelerated to 46%, an 800 basis point increase to a Rule of 40 score from the prior quarter. We will strive to maintain this exceptional balance of top and bottom line performance. Turning to our cash flow. In the third quarter, we generated $141 million in adjusted free cash flow, representing a margin of 25%, and $133 million in cash from operations, representing a margin of 24%. Over the past four quarters, we've generated $490 million in cash flow from operations and $502 million in adjusted free cash flow, marking the first time we've exceeded $0.5 billion in adjusted free cash flow on a trailing 12-month basis. We ended Q3 with $3.3 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term U.S. treasury bills. We retain access to additional liquidity of up to $500 million through our revolving credit facility, which remains entirely undrawn. Now turning to our outlook. For Q4 2023, we expect revenue of between $599 million and $603 million, adjusted income from operations of between $184 million and $188 million, and GAAP net income. For the full year 2023, we are raising our revenue guidance to between $2.216 billion and $2.22 billion. We are raising our adjusted income from operations guidance to between $607 million and $611 million and we continue to expect GAAP net income in each quarter of this year.

Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer

Welcome. The camera doesn't seem to be functioning. Thank you for joining our earnings call. Current events and our business performance clearly validate our strategy of developing the most aligned and effective enterprise products well in advance of their demand, sometimes by years or even decades. Our AIP and U.S. commercial efforts are not just disrupting the market; they are establishing a standard that I believe no other software company will achieve, in part due to their misunderstanding of the value and importance of large language models, and partly because they lack the extensive frontline experience we have in the military regarding precise management and governance. Furthermore, the traditional playbook driven by venture capitalists and analysts has been to create the most simplified technology that doesn't align with enterprise needs, while employing top-tier salespeople, resulting in moderate value for enterprises and excessive revenue extracted in a way that benefits insiders at the expense of retail investors. We have clearly rejected that approach. On the mission front, we have consistently stated and developed products for a world that is violent and fragmented, where strength must be demonstrated, and where failing to do so can embolden biases or hatred, including antisemitism. The reality is you must take a stand; Palantir is the first major company to acknowledge this. There is no longer neutrality. Palantir only provides its products to Western allies and has never supplied them to adversaries. We are proud to support the U.S. government and are committed to assisting Israel in every way possible. When there are tragedies resulting in significant loss of life, we categorize it as an act of terror and support those fighting against such terrorism. We accurately describe the situation and stand by our allies without providing misleading context. We understand the need for context in certain situations, but at Palantir, we recognize that there are genuinely violent individuals who do not abide by moral standards and must be opposed. The products we've developed over the past 20 years are being supplied to our allies, and we take pride in our outcomes. I believe our alignment with our clients and society will yield significant benefits moving forward. For those joining us on this journey, we celebrate your support and will continue to integrate our warrior culture into our products, market fit, and the results we deliver to our allies.

Ana Soro, Finance Team Member

With that, we'll begin with a few questions from our shareholders before we open up the call. Our first question is from Christopher. The current situation in Israel has opened the eyes of other allied countries around the globe, specifically, are there current or future plans supporting our allied partners in Asia with Palantir products?

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer

Absolutely. The short answer is yes. I think not only can we look at Israel, but we can look even before that at Ukraine and the lessons that we've learned there. And I would distill that down simply to that you must preposition data, software, and hardware well ahead of the fight and create a partner mesh network of command and control nodes to really provide a difference here. So that's one major thing. And so we're spending a lot of our time on our energy thinking about how do we get as much mass west of the international dateline as possible to be prepared to meet those moments. And make no mistake, there's a lot to be done there. The other lesson specific from Israel is how much faster you can move when you create a big tent tech ecosystem that allows you to bring in a lot of other defense tech startups along with you. The capabilities that we were able to give the Israeli government by bringing in other Israeli startups as well as international startups was incredible. And that's a key lesson that we're taking forward with us as well. And it's embodied and enabled by Palantir Government Web Services.

Ana Soro, Finance Team Member

Thanks, Shyam. Our next question is from Sony. Congrats on well-executed AI bots delivering tangible value very quickly. Could you kindly attempt to synthesize the top three observations from those boot camps for enterprises to launch AI-enabled decision management systems to power forward their critical objectives?

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer

Sure. I'll take a first stab at this. I would say, one, it's about the magic moments. So the first bit of this that I think people get out of is, what does this really mean to understand that you can't really use these LLMs without tools? So how do you bring that tool bench forward? Two, it's a realization that the semantics of your business ought to be the prompt. And we are uniquely positioned there because the best way to do that is to serialize those semantics into your ontology to use the object model that we have to do that. And so getting...

Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer

We've already built and deployed. One of the most interesting things about the commercial market is there are all these tools we built that basically not only allow you to manage LLMs, but they essentially pen test your enterprise. So always de facto what in the past where you were selling was misaligned with your enterprise. AI forces an alignment with your enterprise. And so you begin to ask really business-relevant questions. And then because of essentially our ability to take the knowledge of your business and put it into the LLM and then extract from the LLM something relevant and then manage it, you get both the power of the LLM and you get the shock movement of the enterprise actually saying, wait a minute, you're providing me something that actually is good for my enterprise. Quite frankly, it's almost like taking an alcoholic off alcohol and saying here's your health drink. And the reason why it just is very, very hard to compete against that is because the other players in this space are actually built to take you away from what is good for your enterprise. How do you make better margins? How do you make your products safer? How do you take the tacit knowledge of a Japanese manufacturing company and build in America with all the advantages of America and the tacit knowledge of Japanese manufacturing? That's what we're actually doing with these things. And then there's all these things we've built that would take decades to build, even if you understood them, that we've already built.

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer

And to add on to that, the Japanese example shows it. I think the third major magic moment that's impactful there is this incorporation of real-time expert feedback and thinking about feedback as a data type unto itself. Not having to retrain or upgrade the parametric knowledge of the model, but actually being able to use feedback dynamically live to create an adaptive model.

Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer

And then I'm sure Ryan will discuss the scale function of this. One logical question is, if you're doing well, why are you pleased to have $40 million in operating income? It's because the unit economics are so strong, moving from boot camps for pilots that took six months to boot camps that officially take two days. I attended one that took six hours; they are so efficient that there's a limit to how many resources we can allocate to this. We're actively doing many things, educating people, and executing at a scale equivalent to what we accomplished in an entire year last year, all in just one month.

Ryan Taylor, Chief Revenue Officer

Yeah. And with our relentless execution, we're seeing the ability and how much easier it is lowering the barrier for customers to see our product applied against their data in real workflows. And so we're seeing the network effects of that. We're seeing customers who have used AIP in one context, going to new companies, adopting it at new companies and converting quickly. We're seeing customers that were with us years ago who are coming back to us because we have the product now that works for what they need. And we're seeing that in a way where they may have tried to build themselves and failed, and they're now able to implement it effectively and quickly in that environment and the vast kind of expansion and advancements of our products are showing that.

Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer

I am very optimistic about the U.S. and somewhat less so about other regions. What stands out about the U.S. market is the job mobility; when people change jobs, they recognize the quality of our product and reach out to us. If we analyze and normalize the results excluding packs, the U.S. is experiencing a growth rate of 52% off a substantial base, which reinforces my belief that we can achieve a $1 billion run rate by 2025. This dynamic nature of America, where people are moving and using our product, together with our ability to adopt a new commercial strategy, is truly transformative for our go-to-market approach. Additionally, this shift is also positively affecting our internal culture. We are on the front lines addressing significant challenges, and those who agree with us are stepping up. We have effectively delivered what is needed for U.S. commercial markets, providing great internal value. It’s exciting to excel amid the competition, especially when we see others struggling to deliver effective solutions while we succeed with our unique offering.

Ana Soro, Finance Team Member

Thank you. Our next question is from Samit, who asks, does Palantir view the U.S. government hardware primes as allies or competitors?

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer

We see the primes as allies, particularly with our government initiatives. Two of the primes are customers of Apollo, and two are utilizing Foundry to enhance internal production and systems integration. Another prime, Northrop, has joined our Titan team. From our viewpoint, America relies on a prime, as our national security hinges on them. There’s considerable discussion in defense tech circles about disrupting the primes, but I believe there’s an immense opportunity to redefine what software can achieve, a space we are at the forefront of. However, the primes are essential for our national security because production is critical. The situation in Ukraine, where ten years' worth of munitions were used in ten weeks, highlights this reality. Moreover, production is becoming increasingly software-defined and optimized. This is evident in much of our commercial business, like when we assist Airbus with the A350 and single-aisle ramp-up, help BP increase hydrocarbon production, or support Panasonic in manufacturing more batteries for Tesla cars. This kind of efficiency transformation is what we aim to bring to the primes as they manage their production needs.

Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer

Maybe what Shyam has done a really magnificent job of is, it's fair to say the primes thought we were competitive with them until recently, and not just primes, but others. But because really to get access to the kinds of data that the Pentagon has you're going to need either Palantir or be able to build something like Palantir. I think in all modesty, people have realized it's pretty hard to do what we've done. So there was this kind of perceived misalignment. And what Shyam has been building out with FedRAMP is giving people a way to partner with us where they can extend what they're doing without having to try, which everybody still does, but it's commonly known will not work. The ability to have access to the underlying data for reasons that are highly technical, it's indeed hard to do. And so getting that full alignment is both much better for Palantir and much better for the nation. And then we're, of course, interested in it because we're pretty mission-focused and we want the nation to function better. And we're also realistic. It's not good for us to be fighting battles. We know we're much better at software. We have no interest in going into hardware. I think increasingly, they know they should not fight us on software, although some still do, which is largely unwise.

Ana Soro, Finance Team Member

Thank you both. Our next question is from Mariana with Bank of America. Mariana, please turn on your camera and then you'll receive a prompt to unmute your line.

Mariana Perez Mora, Analyst

Good morning, everyone. I have two questions for you. First, regarding the government's response to recent geopolitical events, many countries are quickly enhancing their readiness and modernization. What do you anticipate regarding the U.S. accelerating at this pace within a typically more bureaucratic environment? Second, you've already mentioned how AIP has facilitated customers in adopting data analytics and infrastructure. I'm curious to know, aside from boot camps, what other internal changes are taking place? How are you engaging with customers? How are you implementing AIP, and what effect is this having on your margins, considering they now appear to be around 30% operating margins compared to the 25% you previously reported?

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer

Maybe to start with the second one here with AIP. I think you should really think that the boot camp is more than just what's happening in the boot camp. Because you're exiting the boot camp with a series of use cases that are production-ready or near production-ready that you can go forward with. You're exiting the boot camp with as the customer and usually IT with enough hands-on experience with the product that you can actually keep going and compounding it going forward. So there is this exit velocity that's fundamental to it, where it's not just the go-to-market motion, it actually now becomes the implementation motion. It becomes the way in which you engage with partners because now partners can run their boot camps. Partners can drive use case growth for themselves around what came out of the boot camp and the exit velocity around that. So I think it's quite profound and why you're seeing both our emphasis of it and the impact that it's having on both the financials and the operating reality of the business.

Ryan Taylor, Chief Revenue Officer

Yeah. As we mentioned on the last earnings call, we were focused on usage and value of AIP, and we're seeing that by the end of November, 140 organizations will have delivered boot camps too, and we're seeing that and then the conversions that flow from that as well.

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer

And to put that number in perspective, I think roughly 70 of those boot camps will happen this month in November, which is more than the number of commercial pilots we did all of last year. So the velocity scale...

Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer

And we're just starting. We are ramping up to doing them. Yes.

David Glazer, Chief Financial Officer

And then I guess on the margin side, what you're seeing is like we are investing pretty significantly. R&D is up sequentially 11%.

Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer

I think what's confusing is that our current approach in U.S. commercial is incredibly efficient. It's roughly ten times more efficient, and we are increasing our efforts. This is the best method for us to enter the market. It's not limited by budget, but by whether we have trained personnel who understand the product. There's no way to efficiently scale up because if you're growing a business at 52%, the logical step would be to invest heavily, especially since this is the only truly significant market globally. Moreover, if you're redefining the standard, we have demonstrated this with PG, GAIA, and MetaConstellation. It's not just about acquiring clients; it's about establishing a benchmark that competitors cannot match. This is crucial for our market strategies. You might claim you can develop PG, but when the French government says they're going to rebuild it for $40 million, the truth is you can't. Not even for a billion dollars. You need us. You can't replicate Foundry or GAIA. When we approach clients, they learn two things: they discover how they can use our products, and they start asking other vendors for solutions that yield operational results like Palantir does in a matter of hours. They might prefer you for other reasons, but when it comes down to effective results, the timeline you can offer pales in comparison to what we can achieve. No one seriously attempts to build another PG, and you can choose not to use our product, but that's the goal for all our offerings, and it's what I foresee with AIP.

Ana Soro, Finance Team Member

Thank you all. Alex, is there anything you'd like to say before we end today's call?

Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer

As usual, it can be quite a journey for both investors and employees. There’s this term mission-driven culture that I’m beginning to dislike because so many claim it only to draw in support and then abandon their mission. However, we truly believe in our mission and stand firm in it. We invite everyone who wants to be involved, whether as an investor, a team member, or a supporter.

Ana Soro, Finance Team Member

Thank you. That concludes Q&A for today's call.