What the NVIDIA-Palantir Partnership Tells Us About the Future of Performance
By Johan Gauffin and Zach Carper
This week, I read about the NVIDIA-Palantir partnership–one that signals a pivotal step toward realizing operational AI at scale. By integrating NVIDIA’s accelerated computing, CUDA-X libraries, and Nemotron models into Palantir’s Ontology and AI Platform (AIP), the partnership supports the creation of a unified stack for enterprise intelligence that connects data, decision-making, and execution.
But don’t be fooled: this partnership is not about building faster systems with GPUs and Ontologies. It is about enabling people.
The result of this technological convergence is a shift from managing for output to managing for people-enablement–what we call “leverage.” NVIDIA’s compute stack and Palantir’s operational AI framework don’t just build faster, AI-enabled systems; they create a system of leverage, augmenting human judgment, accelerating learning, and compounding institutional knowledge through continuous feedback and optimization
At Foxtrot, we’ve developed expertise in just such systems. Foxtrot’s work has been focused on helping organizations move past simply fast systems to extend human capability through better systems design.
Augmenting Human Performance
NVIDIA and Palantir’s joint platform streamlines complex, data-heavy prediction, analysis, and reasoning to multiply the capabilities, intelligence, and decision-making abilities of human beings.
The platform merges Palantir’s structured decision logic with NVIDIA’s high-performance computing and open AI models, equipping people with the ability to reason, predict, and act within complex environments from logistics and finance to the public sector. But humans always remain in the loop, even at increasingly higher levels of abstraction.
Lowe’s, one of the first adopters of NVIDIA and Palantir’s platform, is already applying the integrated stack to create a digital twin of its supply chain. The system continuously optimizes routes, costs, and processes, demonstrating how operational AI can drive agility and resilience in real-world conditions.
If operational AI can take on the repeatable, mechanical tasks, our teams can focus on what requires judgment, empathy, and creativity. The question becomes: what happens to talent when performance shifts from producing outputs to designing outcomes?
In consulting, performance has traditionally been defined by visibility and the client’s perception of speed, quality, and expertise. But as systems begin to automate the analytical layer of our work, performance will increasingly depend on curiosity, synthesis, and the ability to orchestrate human-machine collaboration. That is not just a technical skillset; it is a mindset.
From Output per Employee to Leverage per Employee
At Foxtrot, our scaling model focuses on building the technological system to enable humans, creating leverage for those humans and the companies they work for. To meet the business goals of our customers, we cannot manage purely through deliverables. We manage for leverage: how much a person can influence, enable, and elevate through systems, coaching, and design.
By combining computational power with structured decision frameworks and shifting the focus from experimentation to operationalization, the NVIDIA-Palantir partnership matures systems to extend human performance. The joint platform will support enterprise AI as it moves beyond proof-of-concept models toward continuous, real-time systems that sit at the center of decision workflows.
At Foxtrot, we’re harnessing these advancements to explore how AI can act as a collaborator, helping our customers reason through complexity, anticipate risks, or surface insights before they are even asked. The real performance multiplier will not come from how hard we work, but from how intelligently we integrate people and technology. That’s what Foxtrot does.
The Future of Talent and Possibility
As Foxtrot grows, I think we will see a shift in what “high performance” means. It will not just be about technical excellence or efficiency. It will be about adaptability, systems thinking, and leadership in the face of ambiguity and accelerating change.
The NVIDIA-Palantir announcement shows where the world is heading: AI as an operating layer that changes how teams learn, collaborate, and decide. Soon, AI will no longer be a discrete tool; it will become an operating layer for the modern enterprise. As AI infrastructure and decision frameworks converge, organizations that design for adaptability and cross-domain intelligence will be positioned to lead. At Foxtrot, we recognize AI’s trajectory as an opportunity to design a culture where that augmentation extends human capability rather than replacing it.
AI’s story is often told in terms of productivity, but the real story is potential and the ability to reimagine how we organize work, develop people, and define value. That is Foxtrot’s next frontier: a company where talent and technology compound instead of compete.
