Written by Luke Munn, research fellow Digital Culture and Societies
What does the Australian supermarket chain Coles have in common with the CIA? As of February 2024, both are clients of聽, a US tech company 鈥渇ocused on creating the world鈥檚 best user experience for working with data鈥�.
In a three-year deal, Coles plans to deploy Palantir鈥檚 tools across more than 840 supermarkets to聽聽and 鈥渞edefine how we think about our workforce鈥�.
The tech company, named after magical seeing stones from the Lord of the Rings, offers comprehensive software that collects, organises and visualises a client鈥檚 data in 鈥溾��. For an intelligence agency, Palantir鈥檚 tools might help聽聽through phone calls and financial transactions; in a healthcare organisation, they might find ways to save money by聽.
For Coles, the聽聽is to 鈥渙ptimise its workforce鈥� by analysing 鈥渙ver 10 billion rows of data, comprising each store, team member, shift and allocation across all intervals in a day, every day鈥�.
The announcement is聽聽to Coles鈥� plan to save a billion dollars over the next four years, and follows a 2019聽, an effort to build聽, and the introduction of聽聽and other high-tech security measures.
The Palantir process
What might this Palantir鈥揅oles collaboration look like in practice?
Typically, Palantir first sends out 鈥渇orward-deployed engineers鈥� to begin work with an organisation鈥檚 data, which is often messy, incomplete and fragmented. These engineers work with different branches and stakeholders to bring the data together into a single compatible whole called 鈥溾��, which contains all the information deemed relevant.
Then the data can be fed into Palantir鈥檚 platforms 鈥� in this case, customisable software called聽聽and the聽.
Read more:聽
The platforms let clients explore the data through聽聽populated by columns and rows, boxes and lines. The Artificial Intelligence Platform also brings ChatGPT-like language models into the mix.
Users might compare earnings between branches, flag a store that seems inefficient, or identify an upcoming period of high spending based on historic patterns.
All of this probably seems banal, or even boring. It鈥檚 certainly less overtly problematic than Palantir鈥檚 work with governments and law enforcement, which has been slammed for enabling聽听辞谤听, and seen the company described as 鈥溾��.
Read more:聽
However, the deal doesn鈥檛 need to be overtly malevolent to be meaningful. A technology of surveillance and control is quietly聽, moving from front-page news to something ticking along silently in the background. In this sense, Palantir shifts from the visible to the operational, imperceptibly but powerfully shaping the lives and livelihoods of Australian supermarket employees and shoppers.
Optimising the workforce
We can briefly sketch out three implications of the deal.
First, by inking this deal, Coles frames itself as future-forward and logistically driven. Groceries and grocery-store labour become more data, just like the hedge funds, healthcare, or immigrants that other Palantir clients coordinate.
Read more:聽
Supermarkets have been under fire over the past year for聽聽through a pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, and accused of聽.
The Palantir deal continues this extractive trajectory. Rather than paying workers more or passing savings onto customers, Coles has chosen to invest millions in technology that will 鈥渁ddress workforce-related spend鈥� as part of a聽聽by a billion dollars over the next four years. Food (and the labour needed to grow, pack and ship it) is transformed from a human need to an optimisation problem.
A walled garden
Second, dependence. As聽, Palantir clients tend to enjoy the all-encompassing data and new features but also become dependent on them. Data mounts up; new servers are needed; licensing fees are high but must be paid.
Much like Apple or Amazon, Palantir鈥檚 services excel at creating 鈥渧endor lock-in鈥�, a perfect walled garden which clients find hard to leave. This pattern suggests that, over the next three years, Coles will increasingly depend on Silicon Valley technology to understand and manage its own business. A company that sells a quarter of Australia鈥檚 groceries may become operationally reliant on a US tech titan.
A way of seeing
Finally, vision. What Palantir sells is fundamentally a way of seeing. Its dashboards promise聽聽that can stretch across an entire organisation or zoom in to granular detail to locate that 鈥渘eedle in the haystack鈥� insight.
The claim is that this data-driven view is a shortcut to聽, a way to map every operation, reveal every important element, and identify every inefficiency.
Yet the data inevitably excludes significant social, financial and environmental information. The sweat of workers struggling to pack at pace, the belt-tightening of consumers struggling to make ends meet, and the struggle of farmers to survive unexpected climate impacts will go untracked.
Such details never appear on the platform 鈥� and if they鈥檙e not data, they don鈥檛 matter. Will Palantir鈥檚 data-driven myopia translate to how Coles views its workers and customers?
By placing Palantir at the heart of its operations, Coles quietly smuggles in several key assumptions: that food is a commodity to be optimised, that paying for labor is a risk rather than a responsibility, and that data can capture everything of importance. At a time of聽, Australians should strongly question whether this is the direction one of our major grocery providers should take.
This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the .
