I used to work for an "AI" company, who claimed (and largely believed) that their main value-proposition was their proprietary secret-sauce (they didn't do anything especially evil like Palantir, but it sounds like the business was structurally similar).
However, most of the time the way they won over their (usually enormous) clients was just as you describe: they took a few weeks to pick through the client's existing data hoards, mapped out what were often dozens or hundreds of disconnected databases, found common identifiers for entities, hooked them all up into a unifying system and then just... queried it. Data unification on its own yielded really impressive results for the clients. To be fair, the company had built up some compelling experience/tech around doing said data unification, but that stopped short of any of the "AI" and was never really how they marketed themselves. Some at the company always saw that part of the process as just a prerequisite for "the real product", but in practice it seemed to be the most useful part.
It's amazing how inefficient data-usage is throughout so many large organizations.
However, most of the time the way they won over their (usually enormous) clients was just as you describe: they took a few weeks to pick through the client's existing data hoards, mapped out what were often dozens or hundreds of disconnected databases, found common identifiers for entities, hooked them all up into a unifying system and then just... queried it. Data unification on its own yielded really impressive results for the clients. To be fair, the company had built up some compelling experience/tech around doing said data unification, but that stopped short of any of the "AI" and was never really how they marketed themselves. Some at the company always saw that part of the process as just a prerequisite for "the real product", but in practice it seemed to be the most useful part.
It's amazing how inefficient data-usage is throughout so many large organizations.