Ontology was the silent word of the 2010s. Palantir built a $400B company on a simple insight: raw data alone isn’t enough to understand how a business operates. You need to map the nouns and verbs of a business—the objects, their states, their relations—on top of the data to navigate the intricacies of any operationally complex organization. The ontology was the grammar of the enterprise. Building an ontology is an immersive, painstaking process of extracting knowledge from the minds of experts across a company.
We recorded our AI Wave podcast a few weeks before the public market SaaSpocalypse. Since then, roughly $1T has been wiped from software and services stocks. The narrative: AI makes software easier to build and models are increasingly doing the work that renders SaaS products useless. So,software is dead?
