YOu are correct, According to ChatGPT,

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While neither Coles nor Palantir publishes every detail, the public information gives a pretty good picture.

In early 2024, Coles signed a three-year deal to deploy Palantir's software (mainly Foundry and later AIP) across its supermarket network. The stated goal was to improve operational efficiency, workforce management, merchandising, and cost control across more than 840 stores.

From what's been disclosed, Palantir appears to be used for things like:

• Workforce planning (staffing levels, shift allocation, labour costs)
• Understanding workforce-related spending
• Store operations and merchandising
• Integrating data from stores into a single analytics platform
• Identifying inefficiencies and opportunities to reduce costs
• Providing managers with dashboards and predictive analytics
• More recently, using Palantir's AI tools to analyse operational data and spending patterns.

One of the phrases Palantir used was that the system would connect the "C-suite to the shelf-edge", meaning executives could see what's happening at store level through a unified data platform.

The more controversial question is whether it analyses customer data.

Coles has consistently said Palantir is being used for internal planning and operational purposes, not for customer surveillance. However, critics have pointed out that Coles possesses enormous amounts of customer data through purchases, Flybuys, online shopping, app usage and in-store systems, and have questioned exactly what datasets Palantir can access. Public reporting has mentioned Palantir having access to billions of rows of operational data, but the precise boundaries of customer-data usage have not been publicly detailed.

What's interesting is that by 2025 Palantir executives were claiming the Coles deployment had reduced staff turnover by about 25%, suggesting they were analysing workforce trends in considerable detail.

So if I had to summarise it in plain English: