The U.S. Department of Agriculture is using Palantir to figure out where its staff should sit, after deciding only the colorful AI company can do the job.
Like other US government agencies, the Department (USDA) has ordered government employees back to the office. According to a contract notice, the return-to-work mandate has created the need for "advanced data integration capabilities to consolidate information from multiple sources, real-time analytics to optimize space utilization and employee seat assignments, and robust security compliance to protect sensitive organizational data"
In a statement to The Register, the USDA ignored our questions about cost and rationale and stated: "This is not a new tool. This tool was deployed last year to support USE IT (building utilization and reporting) and workspace allocation and management."
The contract notice, signed by USDA chief data and artificial intelligence officer Christopher Alvares, acknowledges that other software companies can probably sort out seating plans, but that only Palantir can do the job right.
"While there are several companies that provide data analytics and integration platforms, Databricks, Snowflake, IBM, SAS, Salesforce, and Alteryx, none offer the combination of capabilities, enterprise scale data fusion, real-time analytics, compliance monitoring and integration with existing USDA systems that Palantir provides," Alvares wrote. "Salesforce and similar applications have not demonstrated a product that has advanced data integration capabilities or the agility required to address rapidly changing requirements."
The contract request also calls for suppliers to provide "real time and continuous compliance monitoring with automate[d] risk or alert generation of regulatory compliance officers and other personnel upon detection of threats or anomalies, in addition to establishing complete transaction logging and compliance documentation capabilities across all integrated tools and workflows for regulatory reporting and oversight activities."
Paul Sonn, state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project, a workers' rights advocacy nonprofit, used his LinkedIn account to opine this contract "could potentially bring a workforce surveillance technology known as bossware to the federal workforce, despite concerns about its mental and physical toll on workers and its potential for errors and discrimination."
During Palantir's most recent earnings call CEO Alex Karp and CTO Shyam Sankar boasted about the platform's "lethality" on quasi-legal battlefields - but said nothing about seating charts.
"But from the beginning, we have stuck to our very strong values of expanding what we believe is the noble side of the West, which means being lethal on the front end, meaning outside against adversaries if necessary," Karp said during a Feb. 2 earnings call. ®
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