Palantir Industry AI
Understanding Foundry for Manufacturing
Palantir recently announced its new Industry AI platform for manufacturing. This platform has several key components that differentiate it from other offerings, such as the Manufacturing Data Engine. However, Palantir’s original press release was somewhat complex, so I spent time with Palantir’s Industry AI team to distill the essentials.
Industry AI Integration
The platform fully supports Ignition, a leading software development platform for HMI, SCADA, and MES developed by Inductive Automation. Ignition offers a device-agnostic, fully scalable OT/IT solution. If you’ve already implemented Ignition, Industry AI enhances it with edge computing for data preprocessing, supporting both batch processing and streaming into Foundry.
Industry AI also integrates with your on-premises and cloud systems, merging data from hundreds of disparate sources, including ERP, CRM, and SaaS applications. It supports unstructured data such as PLC logic, engineering schematics, training materials, and procedure specifications. This data is integrated into Foundry’s robust data processing tools to create a comprehensive digital twin of your organization — a significant differentiator from alternatives that often require additional solutions to connect to these sources.
When combined with Foundry’s data processing and modeling capabilities, companies can create a digital twin capable of running what-if scenarios and powering intelligent operations.
Industry AI MQTT
The platform supports subscribing to MQTT topics and can also function as an MQTT broker. It can automatically discover and load tags and is compatible with third-party broker implementations like Mosquito and HiveMQ.
Industry AI Edge
Industry AI includes a leading edge computing platform capable of running any containerized workload. These workloads can connect to your MQTT broker and on-premises systems to preprocess data, with the flexibility to stream or batch the results into Foundry. The platform even allows you to mix and match batch and streaming methods for specific attributes. Data retention is also supported, ensuring that if network access is lost, data can be safely pushed to Foundry once the connection is restored. Workloads are deployed using Palantir Apollo, a powerful CI/CD solution that supports custom release channels to manage risk tolerance and air-gapped environments.
Industry AI Logic
Industry AI connects to your controllers and surfaces the programming logic within Foundry’s ontology. This enables operators and AI agents to leverage this information for developing remediation strategies and optimizing processes. Updated logic can also be deployed to your PLCs as part of a release strategy to continually refine operations.
Intelligent Operations
Palantir’s AIP seamlessly integrates advanced analytics and AI into automated workflows for real-time decision-making. It features multimodal models that can inspect images and analyze inputs like temperature, speed, and seam quality to produce precise anomaly scores. AIP also allows companies to build agentic software using AIP Logic and AIP Automate, which provide explainable AI decision-making and human teaming, yielding truly intelligent operations. Foundry Rules further enhances your operations by producing better signal intelligence accounting for multiple variables and factors that effect alert severity. This information is baked into audit trails for AI and human workers to better assist with remediation and evaluating severity.
Conclusion
Palantir Industry AI represents a step change for manufacturers looking to better understand their operations. Unlocking both the power of AI and humans working together to build and continually refine a digital twin of your business.
