Palantir unlocks supply chain efficiency for agrifood industry with AI

AI is presenting the agriculture industry with a unique opportunity to manage increased market volatility and address systemic issues, like recruiting the next generation of farmers, Francisco Parga, deployment strategist at Palantir, told AgTechNavigator.

Like Nvidia, OpenAI, and other companies, Palantir is one of the leading tech companies deploying AI to solve business challenges for a wide swath of industries, including agrifood. Palantir has contracts with several of the largest food and drink producers, including chicken producer Tyson, consumer packaged goods company General Mills, fast-food giant Wendy’s, and others.

Palantir’s technology is based on its data integration analytics platform, Foundry, and its activation service, Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), Parga explained. An organization connects its data silos (enterprise resourcing planning, customer relationship management, and other systems) with Foundry, and AIP sits on top of that system to provide agentic AI capabilities to better manage supply chains, he added.

For instance, Palantir’s technology can help food producers predict when a food or product will see a dip in demand before it happens, allowing the company to reroute shipments to a market where demand might be higher, Parga said.

AI’s popularity comes as the agrifood chain is responding to increased geopolitical volatility, including tariff-induced supply chain disruptions, and disruptions due to climate change.

Food producers “are now threading an incredibly precise needle through some really tricky conditions. And the only way they can do that is by being as nimble as possible and by being as agile as possible. And I think that is where AI really comes into its own,” Parga elaborated.

Can AI solve agriculture’s labour issue?

Beyond supply chain disruptions, food producers can use AI to build solutions for the next generation, who are digitally native and demanding high-tech tools, Parga noted. Seasoned food producers can capture the knowledge they accumulated from years of growing and selling food with AI, ensuring that insight is not lost for the next generation of professionals, he added.

“The reality is that we built up this tribal knowledge over millennia, and [farming] has always been a very incremental business. You inherit the farm from your parents, [and] you knew what you planted and what rotation. ... And to stray from that in a world that is highly capital intensive — and you do not have much room to maneuver — becomes very risky,” Parga said.

He added, “When we think about reasoning models and Gen AI, you can start to encode a lot of that tribal knowledge — encode a lot of that knowledge you have built over decades and decades.”

For all the fear of AI taking jobs away, Palantir found that AI with human intelligence yields the best business results, i.e., human-in-the-loop AI systems, Parga noted.

“The reality is that the best implementations of this today are heavy human-in-the-loop implementations, purely because of the added governance, added security, added logic. We all know LLMs are very clever, but maybe think of them as interns. They are not quite fully there yet. You cannot fully trust them. ... The human-in-the-loop system, and set up, works very well,” he elaborated.

Nvidia, Palantir partner to accelerate AI

Last week, AI giant Nvidia announced a collaboration with Palantir to develop an “integrated technology stack for operational AI,” where the core of AIP (Palantir Ontology) will be integrated into Nvidia GPUs, as shared in a press release. Home improvement retailer Lowe’s is recreating a digital replica of its supply chain through Nvidia and Palantir technologies, the press release added.

“One of the most influential and major players in the AI space is pairing with us to continue making it a reality. And I think that is what we are going to have to do to ensure that the tech and the models are deployed as efficiently and as effectively as possible,” Parga added.