This year saw the continued push to make better and better large language models (LLMs), but as artificial intelligence (AI) advances, being able to coordinate and manage the various components in an AI system is becoming even more important. Two companies at the forefront of this burgeoning field, called AI orchestration, are Palantir Technologies (PLTR +4.14%) and UiPath (PATH +1.13%).
Both stocks have performed well in 2025, but it was Palantir leading the charge with a more than 135% gain, as of this writing, compared to more than 25% for UiPath.
Let's examine which stock looks poised to outperform next year.
Image source: Getty Images.
The case for Palantir
There haven't been many growth stories as good as Palantir's. The company has seen its revenue increases accelerate each of the past nine quarters, with its total soaring 63% in the third quarter.
This rapid growth stems from the company's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which essentially acts as an operating system to make AI more useful. It does this by gathering data from disparate sources and then organizing it into a way that then connects to real-world assets and processes. This clean, organized data, which links directly to actual objects and concepts, helps significantly reduce AI hallucinations (made-up information) and helps solve real-life problems.
NASDAQ: PLTR
Key Data Points
The company has been adding commercial customers at a strong clip, with its customer count up 45% last quarter. But even more impressive is how quickly customers that sign up for AIP are expanding. Its net revenue retention was a robust 134% over the past 12 months, and this only includes expansion from customers that have been with Palantir for a year or more. And its total U.S. commercial contract value surged 342% last quarter.
The company is also seeing strong growth from its largest customer, the U.S. government, which continues to turn to Palantir to help modernize its military and intelligence branches. The potential use cases for its AI technology are just so extensive that the company has a long runway of growth ahead.
The case for UiPath
UiPath could very well be where Palantir was a few years ago, before it saw its revenue growth begin to accelerate. The company is transforming itself into an AI agent orchestration platform, and growth has just started to pick up.
UiPath's background is in robotic process automation (RPA), which is the use of software bots to perform repetitive, rules-based tasks. The company has been helping manage software bots for many years, and as such, its platform already links to legacy systems and has a compliance and governance framework in place. It is now taking that system and applying it to AI agents.
NYSE: PATH
Key Data Points
The company's Maestro platform lets customers create AI agents through no-code and low-code tools, but its real strength is that it not only manages these internally built AI agents, but also those from third-party vendors. With so many companies going after the AI agent space, there is going to be a plethora of AI agents running around from different vendors. "Agent sprawl" is going to be a growing problem that organizations are going to have to deal with, and Maestro will be there to help manage it.
Another big selling point for UiPath is that Maestro can coordinate both AI agents and software bots and assign which tasks are best suited for each. Software bots can handle simple duties, like data entry, and are cheaper than AI agents, which can tackle more-complex situations. By coordinating AI agents and software bots, Maestro can help customers save money.
The verdict
Palantir is showing incredible growth, but the stock is very expensive, trading at a forward price-to-sales multiple (P/S) of 68 times 2026 analyst revenue estimates. Meanwhile, UiPath trades at a forward P/S of just 5.
UiPath saw its revenue growth accelerate to 16% last quarter from 14% in the second quarter, which isn't that different from the acceleration that Palantir first saw in 2023 when it introduced AIP. If Maestro catches on, UiPath's stock has huge upside from here, given its valuation. As such, I think it is the stock set to outperform in 2026.
