At the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills this week, Palantir Technologies’ CEO Alex Karp and TWG Global co-chair Thomas Tull detailed their latest engagement in artificial intelligence: a major partnership alongside Elon Musk’s xAI Group and the Mark Walter Investment Group, aimed at reshaping how AI is deployed in the financial sector — particularly among regional banks.

Palantir’s shares slipped in the wake of its latest earnings report, despite what most analysts characterized as fundamentally strong results. But Karp seemed undaunted, emphasizing that the “real news” for Palantir and the financial sector wasn’t buried in quarterly figures, but rather in the company’s expanding role as a provider of pragmatic, revenue-driving AI solutions.

“Our mission at Palantir is to give an unfair advantage to our friends,” Karp said in an interview with CNBC’s “Power Lunch.” He credited Tull’s deep investment experience — especially in defense technology — as a catalyst for this latest venture, noting that the combination of Tull’s expertise, Palantir’s infrastructure, and advances in large language models would enable regional banks to “do what big banks are claiming to do and grow their revenue at much lower cost.”

This partnership, according to Karp, seeks to address the regulatory and technical hurdles facing smaller banks. The answer, he argues, lies in highly automated, data-driven systems that don’t just promise efficiency gains, but actually deliver measurable improvements to the bottom line. “One of the problems of the AI revolution is it’s a tale of two cities,” Karp continued. “It’s a tale of people who take your money and give you flowery language… Or you can partner and we partner together… So you can already see the value creation.”

At the heart of Palantir’s pitch is proof: not just of AI’s sophistication, but of its measurable business impact. Thomas Tull, whose team includes former JPMorgan systems architect Drew Kucher, detailed how his group has not only experimented with but actively implemented Palantir’s platform within his own financial holdings. “We use our platform on all our systems, and it’s made an impact, a material impact. And everything we talk about is if you made a dollar before, are you now making more than a dollar or are you just talking about it?” said Tull.

The challenge, they agree, is more than just technological — it is one of credibility and real-world execution. In Karp’s words, Palantir’s approach is to create value “by being downstream of value creation at Palantir and with our partners.” That means the company gets paid only if its technology helps clients actually make more money, not just promises innovation for its own sake. “We’re not going to be making any big money unless the people we work with make even more money,” Karp said.

Palantir’s own growth trajectory signals the efficacy of this model. The company, long recognized for its government contracts and high-security data analysis, has in recent quarters recorded a 71% growth rate in U.S. commercial revenue — a figure that Karp highlighted as emblematic of AI’s potential in private-sector, profit-driven applications.

AI, Karp and Tull argue, can no longer be discussed only in speculative or sci-fi terms. “AI is really good at taking money. It’s not been very good at making money,” quipped CNBC’s Brian Sullivan during the conversation. Karp pushed back: “There’s a rule of financial hygiene called a rule of 40. We, I think, [have] the highest ever recorded or one of the highest ever recorded: 83. We make money by being downstream of value creation.”

While much of the generative AI surge in tech has focused on experimentation and brand enhancement, Palantir’s Memphis-based processing center, substantial infrastructure investments, and deep bench in applied AI bring immediacy to the company’s claims. “With this deal, you’re kind of already buying the tree,” Sullivan noted, alluding to the maturity of Palantir’s offerings.

Tull was eager to hammer home that the venture is poised to deliver tangible results quickly, leveraging TWG’s banking and insurance experience and Palantir’s proven technological backbone. “By this year, we’ll be out with major customers across banking, insurance, money management. And I think by having,” Tull began, before continuing on the momentum already established within his own portfolio.

For a financial sector dealing with mounting regulatory pressures, increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, and the imperative to modernize customer-facing operations, Palantir and its partners contend they have an actionable solution, not just an R&D pipeline. Their goal is to re-level the playing field between regional and megabanks, with AI at the heart of that strategy — and the profits, so they say, to prove it.