/ 04 · WHY US

The questions a CDO asks us in the first meeting. And how we answer them.

We do not compete on slogans. We compete on what the regulator will accept, what your CFO will fund, and what your engineering team has to maintain on Friday afternoon.

VS. PALANTIR FOUNDRY

Why not just deploy Foundry?

“We looked at Foundry. The capability is genuine. The implementation timeline and price are not.”

The Foundry path

  • Six to twelve months to first production use case
  • Bespoke ontology designed in-engagement
  • Forward Deployed Engineers, multi-million programme
  • Heavy lock-in to one platform's tooling
  • Powerful, but you are buying a platform and a team

Our path

  • Six weeks to production with the vertical pack
  • Pre-built ontology, refined per customer not built per customer
  • A tenth of the implementation cost
  • Runs in your tenant, on substrate you can swap
  • One engagement, the whole foundation
VS. VECTOR RAG COPILOTS

We already have a copilot on a vector store.

“The copilot demos beautifully. The compliance team will not sign off on it.”

The vector-RAG path

  • Embeds documents, retrieves similar chunks
  • Single-hop retrieval, no traversal
  • Plausible answers, no auditable reasoning
  • Confidence scores, not provenance
  • The model still hallucinates connecting joins

Our path

  • Typed entities and relationships, not embedded chunks
  • Multi-hop traversal across the graph
  • Every claim traces to a graph path your QA can audit
  • Citations and reasoning trace, not similarity scores
  • The regulator gets evidence, not embeddings
VS. ATLAN OR COLLIBRA

A catalogue is just half the answer.

“We bought the catalogue. The agents still cannot read it.”

The catalogue-only path

  • Describes data: tables, columns, owners, glossary
  • Built for human stewards, not AI agents
  • No ontology, no graph, no reasoning surface
  • Your AI team still has to build the next four layers
  • Catalogues are necessary, not sufficient

Our path

  • A catalogue is one of five layers we deliver
  • Binds catalogue metadata to typed entities
  • Builds the graph, the analytics, the agent layer
  • Open-source DataHub as the catalogue, managed by us
  • The whole agent-readable foundation, in one product
VS. BUILD IT YOURSELVES

We have an internal team. Why not build it?

“Our team is brilliant. They are also doing three other things this year.”

The build-it path

  • Eighteen to thirty months to a comparable foundation
  • Carries the cost of a permanent platform team
  • Compounds the maintenance burden of every layer
  • Risk of building the third version of what already exists
  • Tying senior engineers to plumbing, not differentiation

Our path

  • Six weeks to production, one engagement
  • We operate the platform, your team operates the value
  • Vertical pack improvements compound across customers
  • Branded as yours, so your team owns the surface
  • Your senior engineers free to do what only they can do
/ AT A GLANCE

The comparison matrix. Same questions, different answers.

Palantir Foundry Vector RAG Catalogue only FoundationAI
Time to production 6 to 12 months Days to weeks for the demo 3 to 6 months for the catalogue Six weeks, one engagement
Layers delivered Five, bespoke each time One (retrieval) One (catalogue) Five, packaged per vertical
Answer artefact Citable from ontology Plausible from embeddings No answer layer Citable, reasoning trace, exportable
Multi-hop reasoning Yes, in Foundry tooling No, single-hop retrieval No, descriptive only Yes, walked on a typed graph
Tenancy Hosted or your environment Varies by vendor Hosted or your environment Your tenant, your keys, every time
Regulator-ready Yes, in heavy deployments No, embeddings are not evidence Partial, descriptive evidence only Yes, audit trace exportable
Lock-in profile Heavy, one-vendor stack Light, swappable Medium, descriptive layer Open substrate (DataHub), portable graph
Implementation cost Multi-million programme Low Six to seven figures A tenth of a Foundry programme

The first meeting is thirty minutes. Bring your hardest stuck pilot.

No deck, no demo theatre. We will tell you whether the foundation is the reason your AI has not landed.

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