Global trade patterns are being redefined. As tariffs reshape international commerce, enterprises face a once-in-a-generation inflection point. To successfully navigate the rapidly evolving supply chains, dynamic pricing structures, and ever-shifting regulations, they will need to reevaluate their longstanding business practices in real-time or risk falling behind.
This post explores how enterprises can harness Palantir to address the tariffs challenge. By leveraging Palantir’s AI and machine learning capabilities for dynamic forecasting and scenario analysis, businesses can proactively reshape their operations, optimize costs, and remain competitive in the new global trading order. With Palantir, businesses can swiftly transform the complexities of the global trading landscape into insights, action, and strategic advantage.
Tariffs Are the New Norm
In recent decades, the global trading system has been centered on multilateral agreements and relatively open market access. This model allowed businesses to source low-cost goods from a variety of regions with minimal restrictions, encouraging industries to build intricate, interdependent supply chains and design operations around just-in-time practices.
Yet, as tariffs rise globally, this system faces rapid and cascading strain. Companies that once relied on a steady flow of finished or unfinished goods from a single country may suddenly encounter high tariffs, which reverberate through every aspect of their operations:
- Increased Import Costs: Tariffs increase the cost of importing goods, leading to compounded effects on pricing strategies, profit margins, and overall competitiveness. Costs can spike not only when goods cross borders but also when countries implement retaliatory measures, causing immediate price volatility.
- Supplier Replacement Challenges: Enterprises seeking to replace existing suppliers may be unaware of the terms in their existing contracts, risking litigation or hefty penalties for early termination if they attempt to switch to partners.
- Sourcing and Onboarding New Suppliers: Even if companies overcome potential legal hurdles, they must identify new suppliers. Which regions offer the right capacity, quality, and pricing? How quickly can they source and onboard a new partner without disrupting production or compromising quality standards?
- Managing Additional Costs: Ultimately, businesses will likely face unavoidable added costs. How much of these costs should be passed on to consumers? Can they find efficiencies internally that could absorb those costs without affecting consumers? Should they shelve certain products to maintain profitability?
Companies cannot afford to dismiss these challenges as mere political anomalies. While each U.S. presidential administration may impose tariffs with varying levels and targets, support for these measures now transcends party lines. The American economy must reorient itself for a period of controlled market access and higher import costs. Doing so will require a fundamental shift in how businesses source supplies, manage inventories, and price their products. Although such changes typically unfold over the course of months or years, enterprises do not have the luxury of time to adapt.
How Palantir’s Ontology-Driven AI Delivers a Competitive Edge
AI can play a vital role in navigating the tariffs challenges outlined above with speed and scale. While many AI software solutions can optimize individual supply chain nodes or assist with pricing adjustments, Palantir offers a comprehensive approach. Palantir Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) integrate a wide array of relevant data sources, workflows, and operational insights into a unified, dynamic system. This integration ensures that tariff-related decisions consider the full operational context. It adheres to human-defined business logic, triggering necessary adjustments across the enterprise in real-time. As a result, the ripple effects of a business’s actions are continuously monitored, facilitating data-driven actions throughout the organization.
Palantir’s Ontology System can weave together every aspect of an enterprise, from logistics and inventory to finance, compliance, and sales. By integrating all of an organization’s siloed and unstructured data from various single-point software solutions, Palantir’s platform captures how companies actually operate: the unspoken rules, domain expertise, and context-driven preferences typically residing in the minds of key individuals or hidden in Excel sheets. By transforming this “tribal knowledge” into executable software logic, Palantir’s solutions can reduce a company’s dwell time, empowering human talent to execute rote, time-consuming processes and decisions far more quickly, thereby freeing them to focus on what truly matters.
By capturing a business’s full context, the Ontology also unlocks the full power of large language models. Ontologies serve as the “knowledge scaffolding” that allows AI models — especially large language models — to see and reason about the relationships between different data points. They map an organization’s data, business logic, and processes into a structured, semantic framework, so that AI can operate in a context-rich environment rather than relying on fragmented information. By establishing clear relationships and hierarchies, the Ontology enables LLMs to synthesize insights more accurately and reduce errors, while automating complex decisions within the bounds of human-defined logic.
Real World Impact: Streamlining Decisions in a Tariff Crisis
Imagine a consumer goods manufacturer suddenly confronted with increased tariffs on steel, a critical component of its best-selling product. With Palantir’s Ontology in place to unify and organize the company’s data, the platform immediately identifies the impacted supply routes, contracts, and cost models. Rather than juggling spreadsheets or coordinating with multiple departments, the CFO and operations leaders can obtain an immediate, unified view of the impact on margins, production schedules, and delivery timelines. Palantir’s platform then leverages multiple LLMs to generate actionable proposals rooted in the business’s core logic — whether that involves suggesting temporary sourcing alternatives, rebalancing inventory, or adjusting product pricing. Once a course of action is chosen, the changes propagate throughout the system, automatically updating everything from procurement orders to compliance records.
Freed from manual data wrangling, teams can focus on high-level strategic decisions, while the AI facilitates consistent and precise execution down to the smallest operational detail. The outcome is a boost in speed, accuracy, and cost savings — transforming potential tariff setbacks into a competitive advantage.
How Palantir Delivers Speed to Value to Navigate Tariffs Quickly
Palantir offers a robust solution to build a tariff navigation framework for major enterprises within weeks, delivering rapid value through a three-step process:
Step 1. Establish a Real-Time Data Pipeline
- Ingest Real-Time Data: Create a real-time data pipeline that incorporates live tariff rates and enterprise data to develop a bespoke ontology tailored to your organization.
- System Integration: Seamlessly connect to your existing data and systems, including ERP, POS, CRM, S&OP, HR, and payroll.
Step 2. Comprehensive Portfolio Analysis
- Granular Cost Insights: Provide a detailed view of the costs of goods sold, assessing the impact of tariffs across your entire product portfolio.
- Product-Level Evaluation: Analyze individual sourcing, supply chain, and merchandising strategies at a product level to identify opportunities and risks.
Step 3. Actionable Insights and Mitigation
- Platform-Enabled Actions: Utilize Palantir’s platform to mitigate the impact of tariffs at both the portfolio and product levels. Execute marketplace offerings using your enterprise’s custom ontology, with write-back capabilities for informed decision-making and awareness of downstream impacts.
Ontology-Enhanced Applications for Tariff Management
Palantir applications, built on top of the ontology, empower businesses to rapidly address the impact of tariffs:
- HTS Code and US Tariff Impact Calculator: Automate the generation of global Harmonized System (HS) Codes and the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) of the United States (HTS) Codes, updating the Product Cost 360 portal in real time.
- AIP Product Cost 360: Gain a comprehensive view of your product cost journey, from raw materials to finished goods, factoring in both dynamic and static costs.
- AIP Tariff Scenario Planner: Evaluate the impact of various tariff scenarios across your entire portfolio to make strategic adjustments.
- Procurement 360: Equip Procurement teams with a granular understanding of organizational needs with AIP. This enables teams to optimize cost and quality by harmonizing historical purchases with real-time canonical product hierarchy.
- Route Optimization: Optimize order bundling into routes across tariff-free countries, orchestrating the most cost- and time-efficient shipment methods by considering real-time capacity and network costs.
Secure Your Strategic Advantage in a Dynamic Tariff Landscape with Palantir
Palantir empowers businesses to not only adapt to the evolving tariff landscape but also secure a long-term strategic advantage by providing a comprehensive framework that unifies data, optimizes supply chains, and enhances decision making processes.
By understanding the downstream impacts of actions taken to mitigate tariff prices from an SKU to portfolio level, businesses can act swiftly and with data-driven precision. As the world continues to navigate the challenges of a new trading order, Palantir’s Ontology and AI tools can revolutionize tariff and crisis management so that businesses can navigate the complexity of the global trading order. By transforming potential tariff challenges into strategic advantages, Palantir’s solutions drive efficiency and competitiveness in a dynamic market landscape.
Mastering Tariffs with Palantir was originally published in Palantir Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.