Opinion Palantir CEO Alex Karp has an inimitable aptitude for sniffing out the politically sensitive topic about which, by his own admission, he should not be speaking, but which will also win him the most attention.
Last year, it was the idea of innate western superiority and his belief that his company’s software product was “the only reason why someone’s not goose-stepping between me and you” on the streets of Europe.
This week, after promising not to go on one of his “usual political screeds,” the Palantir CEO went off on one, as the Brits like to say, launching into a speculative analysis of the impact of AI on immigration. Two hot topics in one: bingo.
Flying into Davos for the World Economic Forum — or perhaps appearing in a puff of red smoke from under a ghoulish cloak — Karp responded to probing about the impact of AI on the jobs market.
“I do think these trends [in AI] really do make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration unless you have a very specialized skill,” he said.
He was unlikely to have his worldview significantly challenged by his interviewer, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, the septuagenarian billionaire Co-Chairman of the World Economic Forum.
And so it proved, with Fink gliding past the notion that many immigrants fulfil roles in health, construction, or service industry jobs that western nations find hard to fill, and focusing on the important point for attendees: the impact on white-collar jobs.
The point is not without merit: 4.7 million non-US-born workers fulfil professional and business services roles, for example.
During the World Economic Forum session, Karp agreed that AI would lead to fewer white collar jobs. But went on to say that organizations “need different ways of testing aptitude.”
Palantir boss says outfit’s software the only reason the ‘goose step’ has not returned to Europe
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“There are a lot of people doing X that should be doing Y,” he said, adding that one of his main tasks at the US-based spy-tech company was “walking around figuring out what is someone’s outlier aptitude.”
Outside the febrile atmosphere of the WEF Annual Meeting, skeptics on the actual benefits of AI are becoming more commonplace.
Yesterday, Deutsche Bank analysts Adrian Cox and Stefan Abrudan published a note declaring the “the honeymoon is over” for AI. The AI market will be hit by disillusionment, dislocation, and distrust, they said. “This matters as AI investment and optimism are buoying the global economy, accounting for most of economic and earnings growth in the US last year,” they said, suggesting the consequences should the AI boom go into reverse.
The sentiment echoed earlier comments from Gartner, which said enterprise adoption of AI was in the so-called “trough of disillusionment,” while investment from AI, cloud, and software companies was still sky-rocketing. Meanwhile, the majority of CEOs are reporting zero pay-offs from AI investments, according to PwC.
Karp admitted AI is a “very low-trust environment,” which is why Palantir needs very few salespeople.
In the case of building AI systems, he said, “people have tried lots of stuff. A lot of it hasn’t worked. But if [like Palantir] you’ve delivered stuff that does work, why do you need a salesforce?”
Of course, in the conversation about AI and the future of work in the western world, Karp found room to claim Palantir’s enterprise projects can save “80 percent of your cost and improve your top line dramatically.”
Perhaps the question is really, when you have Alex Karp, why do you need a salesforce? He admitted he got pressure from inside Palantir saying he “should stop speaking in public,” but that’s all part of the schtick. Because, notwithstanding the chronic verbal diarrhea, his outlier aptitude is undoubtedly making himself and his company the center of attention. It’s a shame we will all smell the consequences when the winds change. ®