C3.ai Stock

C3.ai, Inc. (C3 AI) operates as an enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) software provider.

The company’s C3 AI Platform supports accelerating digital transformation in various industries with prebuilt and configurable C3 AI Applications for business use cases, including predictive maintenance, fraud detection, sensor network health, supply network optimization, energy management, anti-money laundering, and customer engagement. The company supports customers in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world.

C3 AI delivers a family of fully integrated products, including the C3 AI Platform, an end-to-end platform for developing, deploying, and operating Enterprise AI applications, C3 AI Applications, a portfolio of industry-specific software-as-a-service, or SaaS, Enterprise AI applications that enable the digital transformation of organizations globally, and C3 Generative AI, a suite of large artificial intelligence, or AI, transformer models for enterprise.

The C3 AI Platform, C3 AI Applications, and the company’s patented model-driven architecture, enable organizations to simplify and accelerate Enterprise AI application development, deployment, and administration. The company’s C3 AI Software platform also enables developers to rapidly build applications by using conceptual models of all the elements required by an Enterprise AI application instead of having to write complex, lengthy, structured programming code to define, control, and integrate the many requisite data and microservices components to work together. The company significantly reduces the effort and complexity of the Enterprise AI software engineering problem.

The C3 Generative AI Product Suite provides enterprise users with a transformative user experience using a natural language interface to rapidly locate, retrieve, and present relevant data across the entire corpus of an enterprise’s information systems. The C3 Generative AI Product Suite enables rapid access to information, analyses, and predictive analytics associated with and derived from enterprise and external systems while respecting access controls. The C3 Generative AI Product Suite is built natively into the C3 AI Platform and packaged with every C3 AI application.

C3 Generative AI is also available as a standalone capability deployable against customer datasets and software applications enabling customers to leverage large language models (LLMs) and pretrained generative transformers (GPTs) to transform enterprise search.

Enterprise AI Software Solutions

The company has built a solution that enables its customers to rapidly develop, deploy, and operate large-scale Enterprise AI applications. Customers can deploy C3 AI Software on major public cloud infrastructures, private cloud or hybrid environments, or directly on their servers and processors. The company provides its customers and partners with an antidote to AI vendor lock-in.

The company offers four primary families of software solutions, which the company collectively refers to as its C3 AI Software:

C3 AI Platform, the company’s core technology, is a comprehensive, end-to-end application development and runtime environment that is designed to allow the company’s customers to rapidly design, develop, and deploy Enterprise AI applications of any type.

C3 AI Applications, built using the C3 AI Platform, is a portfolio of pre-built, extensible, industry-specific and application-specific SaaS Enterprise AI applications that can be rapidly installed and deployed.

C3 Generative AI Product Suite, the company’s latest innovation, enables customers to leverage LLMs to rapidly locate, retrieve, and present information across disparate data stores, applications, and enterprise information systems.

C3 AI Ex Machina is a no-code, machine learning, or ML, solution that empowers citizen data scientists with cloud-native, complete end-to-end capabilities, connecting to diverse data sources and types, and that enables business analysts to rapidly perform data science tasks such as building, configuring, training, and visualizing AI models.

C3 AI Platform

The C3 AI Platform offers the only end-to-end platform-as-a-service that allows customers to rapidly design, develop, provision, and operate Enterprise AI applications at scale. The company’s customers can use the C3 AI Platform to build and operate their own custom Enterprise AI applications and to customize, operate, and manage C3 AI Applications.

The C3 AI Platform uses a unique model-driven architecture to accelerate delivery and reduce the complexities of developing Enterprise AI applications. The C3 AI model-driven architecture provides an ‘abstraction layer,’ that allows developers to build Enterprise AI applications by using conceptual models of all the elements an application requires, instead of writing lengthy code.

The C3 AI Platform enables the company and its customers to develop Enterprise AI applications by using conceptual models of all the elements required by the application—e.g., data objects (customer, order, contract, etc.), computing resources (database, storage, messaging), data processing services (stream processing, batch processing, etc.), AI and ML services (model training, model pipeline management, etc.)—instead of having to write complex, lengthy code. This approach vastly reduces technical complexity for developers and the amount of code they need to write. The C3 AI Platform provides comprehensive capabilities to rapidly develop, deploy, and operate Enterprise AI applications at scale, including:

Data Integration and Management Services: Services to readily ingest and aggregate massive volumes of diverse data from numerous internal and external sources and unify the data in a common and extensible data image.

AI Application Development and Operationalization Services: Software services to explore data, build and train AI models, and operationalize AI models and applications at enterprise scale.

Operational and Security Services: Cohesive core platform services (e.g., access control, data encryption, cybersecurity, time-series services, normalization, data privacy, etc.).

C3 AI Integrated Development Studio (C3 AI IDS): A low-code/no-code visual toolkit for developing, deploying, and operating Enterprise AI applications.

C3 AI Applications

C3 AI Applications is an expanding portfolio of turnkey and ready-to-use suite of Enterprise AI applications that address a range of high-value use cases. With C3 AI Applications, organizations can typically deploy enterprise-scale production AI applications in one to six months. Each of these applications is extensible and customizable to meet customer requirements.

C3 AI Reliability Suite

The C3 AI Reliability Suite drives enterprise asset performance, reduces downtime, and improves process efficiency. C3 AI customers use the C3 AI Reliability Suite to identify and predict asset performance risks, intervene before downtime occurs, and maximize asset performance.

The C3 AI Reliability Suite offers a flexible and scalable AI approach with better precision than alternatives. C3 AI’s value proposition within reliability emphasizes its complementary approach to existing asset management and data historian systems; detailed asset hierarchy modeling, including asset templates and failure mode libraries; flexible AI pipelines that leverage best-in-class ML frameworks with AI explainability; and comprehensive user workflows to action AI recommendations, with bidirectional integrations to work management and operations systems.

Three discrete applications comprise the C3 AI Reliability Suite:

C3 AI Reliability increases operations, process, and equipment uptime by anticipating equipment risks and failures.

C3 AI Process Optimization improves production rate and product quality with AI-optimized process control parameters in complex batch, semi-batch, or process manufacturing.

C3 AI Production Optimization enhances upstream oil and gas production, reduces operational expenses, and improves operational visibility.

C3 AI Supply Chain Suite

The C3 AI Supply Chain Suite significantly improves supply chain resiliency and efficiency with proactive risk mitigation and advanced optimization. C3 AI’s value proposition in supply chain emphasizes its strength in data unification for enterprise and external data to enable near-real-time global visibility of all goods, orders, and transportation; detailed part-level tracking across the supply chain; advanced AI to preemptively detect and mitigate risks, optimize processes, and avoid disruptions; and fully complementary approach with enterprise resource planning, or ERP, systems (e.g., SAP ERP) and supply chain planning tools (e.g., SAP IBP and Logility).

Customers rely on the C3 AI Supply Chain Suite to rapidly improve business outcomes while providing flexibility in how they manage their entire supply chain software ecosystem. One large global manufacturing C3 AI customer uses C3 AI’s production scheduling software to support facilities using mainframe systems, continuing to use the same C3 AI Software while the underlying systems are upgraded to SAP ERP, highlighting the versatility and future-proofing of the model-driven architecture.

Five discrete applications comprise the C3 AI Supply Chain Suite:

C3 AI Supply Network Risk identifies emerging inbound and outbound risks across the network.

C3 AI Inventory Optimization analyzes variability across demand, supply, and production and optimizes inventory levels of all goods to eliminate excess inventory.

C3 AI Demand Forecasting provides AI-based demand segmentation and granular, precision demand forecasts by capturing all high-value demand signals from enterprise and external data sources.

C3 AI Production Schedule Optimization improves production efficiency using a holistic view of demand, supply, manufacturing, and distribution.

C3 AI Sourcing Optimization reduces sourcing costs by detecting pricing anomalies and proactively monitoring all sourcing activity, based on feedback and other information provided from the company’s customers.

C3 AI Sustainability Suite

The C3 AI Sustainability Suite helps decrease greenhouse gas, or GHG, emissions, meet stakeholder and regulatory-specific environmental, social and governance, or ESG, expectations, and reduce energy costs, offering an alternative to existing reporting solutions and dramatically improving upon OEM-provided software (e.g., Siemens and Schneider) by using advanced AI and ML to reduce energy costs and GHG emissions.

Sustainability and energy management professionals struggle with three core challenges: time-consuming, manual, and error-prone process to cobble together siloed data for ESG reporting; an ever-evolving array of international reporting standards (e.g., CDP, GRI, and SASB); and forecasting ESG performance and managing goals (and individual projects) that are often outside of the ESG team’s capabilities. C3 AI Sustainability Suite solves these challenges and provides workflows and AI recommendations that enable teams and business units to collaborate on data unification across source systems, auto report generation aligned with major frameworks, and ESG forecasting and performance management.

Two applications comprise the C3 AI Sustainability Suite:

C3 AI ESG lets companies measure, monitor, report, and improve their ESG performance, including scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions data.

C3 AI Energy Management helps operations teams achieve targets for energy cost, GHG emissions, water consumption, and waste reduction. The application models energy efficiency and emissions at every level of industrial processes from the individual equipment up to the facility, as well as SKU-level product carbon footprints.

C3 AI Defense & Intelligence Suite

C3 AI Defense & Intelligence Suite helps maximize mission capabilities. C3 AI customers span the U.S. Department of Defense, or the DoD (including branches, such as the U.S. Air Force), the Missile Defense Agency, and the DoD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. C3 AI offers a core suite of products adaptable for each agency’s needs.

C3 AI differentiates on scalability of AI/ML and user workflows to solve critical missions. C3 AI’s defense & intelligence customers solve the following core needs with C3 AI: rapid, multi-source data ingestion (e.g., structured, image, video, and text); efficient and scalable application of AI, ML, and deep learning techniques to provide novel insights; and user-driven workflows that support investigative analyses, collaboration, and what-if scenario management.

Three core applications comprise the C3 AI Defense & Intelligence Suite:

C3 AI Readiness, configured across over 15 aircraft platforms, applies AI and advanced ML to help reduce unscheduled maintenance, pre-position spare parts, and increase mission capability.

C3 AI Intelligence Analysis accelerates investigative timelines with encrypted, obfuscated, federated search on people and relationships leveraging near real time, configurable machine learning pipelines for entities and sentiments.

C3 AI Decision Advantage improves domain awareness and force management by synthesizing multiple intelligence sources in near real-time and enabling commanders and other decision makers with AI insights.

C3 AI State and Local Government Suite

C3 AI State and Local Government Suite brings the power of Enterprise AI to state and local governments and law enforcement agencies, helping maximize tax revenues by providing highly precise property appraisals and enhancing public safety with AI-powered intelligence analysis.

For state, county and municipal law enforcement agencies:

C3 AI Law Enforcement provides a single view for all relevant systems (e.g., jail records, license plate readers, record management, and historical investigations), a natural language search interface to query for keywords across those sources, and an investigative visual graph network to explore connections, lowering the cost and time of criminal investigation.

For county property assessors and appraisers:

C3 AI Residential Property Appraisal and C3 AI Commercial Property Appraisal provide data unification across numerous disparate systems and creates highly defensible property valuations, reducing the cost and time of real property appraisal.

C3 AI CRM Suite

C3 AI CRM adds to existing customer relationship management, or CRM, implementations with AI and delivers revenue-driving insights. C3 AI CRM does not replace existing CRM systems but significantly improves their utility. C3 AI CRM does not compete with core CRM systems (e.g., Salesforce); rather, it provides complementary AI-driven insights across revenue operations and intelligence and sales engagement. The application solves complex problems across bookings forecasting and opportunity scoring using differentiated capabilities to integrate a comprehensive set of external data feeds (market data, news, firmographic information, etc.), provide industry-specific data models, apply best-in-class algorithms on each opportunity and stage, and supports generative AI for enterprise search.

C3 AI Financial Services Suite

The C3 AI Financial Services Suite helps minimize compliance risks, improve balance attrition, increase customer satisfaction, reduce customer churn, identify fraud, and drive employee productivity with workflow-enabled AI applications. With flexible deployment options across public/private cloud or on-premise, its secure architecture, and open ML and AI framework, the C3 AI Financial Services Suite is uniquely positioned to drive significant business value for customers.

Three discrete applications comprise the C3 AI Financial Services Suite:

C3 AI Anti-Money Laundering helps detect suspicious financial activity, identify fraudulent transactions, and flag bad actors with superior detection accuracy while reducing the false alerts for AML investigators.

C3 AI Smart Lending drives productivity and customer satisfaction within the credit application and approval process, providing credit officers with contextualized insights that reduce processing timelines and increase approval precision.

C3 AI Cash Management proactively monitors client treasury activity and preemptively predicts potential deposit churn to prevent balance attrition, helping increase customer retention and grow deposit balances.

C3 Generative AI Product Suite

Generative AI models have attracted attention in recent months due to capability improvements published by OpenAI, Google, and academic researchers. These new breed of transformer-based models are proving valuable at parsing, understanding, and generating natural language and images. C3 AI is in a unique position to apply this technology to solve enterprise problems and has the foundation to operationalize large, deep learning models at scale. C3 AI Software can integrate, transfer-learn, operate, and manage, large, complex, transformer AI models. The C3 Generative AI Product Suite, the company’s latest innovation, is an example of this.

The C3 Generative AI Product Suite enables increased access to information, analyses, and predictive analytics associated with and derived from a combination of enterprise and external information systems. This product suite combines the look, feel, and user interface of common search web interfaces with natural language understanding; generative AI models; retrieval AI models; reinforcement learning and a model-driven architecture (for the conceptual representation of enterprise and external data sets, optional data virtualization, and full enterprise access controls/security).

The first product of the C3 Generative AI Product Suite, Search, focuses on enterprise information retrieval. C3 Generative AI will soon be available in all C3 AI Applications; the company is working with several beta customers. Customers will be able to use C3 Generative AI as a standalone product, applied to their existing data lakes, data warehouses, and enterprise applications.

C3 AI Ex Machina

C3 AI Ex Machina is a no-code solution that provides secure, easy access to analysis-ready data, and enables business analysts without data science training to rapidly perform data science tasks, such as building, configuring, and training AI models. C3 AI Ex Machina can be used as a standalone application—providing a modern, cloud-native, highly scalable replacement for last-generation tools—and with the C3 AI Platform, typically as the primary tool used by non-developer business analysts to build, train, and tune models on the C3 AI Platform. C3 AI Ex Machina is targeted at the ‘citizen’ data scientist. Customers can sign up online and immediately begin using the product, including paid subscriptions and an initial no cost offering.

Lighthouse Customers

The company has established intimate strategic relationships with the company’s customers, including a number of large multinational corporations and government entities. The company commonly enters into enterprise-wide agreements with entities that include multiple operating units or divisions. The core of this strategy has been to rapidly deliver high-value outcomes at large scale, across multiple industries, including banking, manufacturing, defense, oil and gas, and utilities. The company then uses these use cases and outcomes to initiate discussions at numerous leading companies in each sector.

C3 AI Sales Cycle

The company’s typical sales cycle begins with one or more product and technical presentations about C3 AI, leading to a mapping of the company’s capabilities to customer use cases. After the company’s pivot to a consumption-based pricing model, mapping the company’s capabilities to customer use cases frequently leads to a paid pilot for the C3 AI Platform, a C3 AI Application, and C3 AI Center of Excellence (COE), including support services that lasts up to six months. During that period, the company works with the customer to deploy a production-level C3 AI Application. After completing a successful pilot, the company’s customers will commonly continue to license the C3 AI Application and the C3 AI Platform for a consumption-based fee. Over time, the company’s customers typically expand usage by adding users, expanding their use of the initial application to another use cases, purchasing additional C3 AI Applications for a subscription fee and by developing their own AI applications on the C3 AI Platform, which increases consumption-based fees as usage scales. Additionally, C3 AI can continue to support the company’s customers as needed with its software and COE support services.

Partner Model

C3 AI’s Enterprise AI expertise and technology combined with the company’s partners’ deep domain expertise enhances the company’s solutions to joint customers. In the year ended April 30, 2023 (fiscal year 2023), the company made significant progress establishing and extending productive partnerships. The company’s partner ecosystem is increasingly effective at opening new doors with new customers and expanding product offerings with existing customers. In fiscal year 2023, the company closed 71 agreements with and through the company’s partner network, which includes Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft, Baker Hughes, and Booz Allen.

C3 AI and Google Cloud initially partnered in 2021 and the company expanded the partnership agreement in September 2022. The three-year agreement expands global joint selling activities and provides tighter integrations between C3 AI Applications and Google Cloud services. Under the terms of the partnership, the two companies are scaling their joint go-to-market strategy and expanding their joint customer pilot programs with Fortune 2000 companies. Through this partnership, the team has identified a significant number of opportunities in the commercial and public sectors. All C3 AI Applications have been optimized to run in the Google Cloud Platform environment and are available in the Google Cloud Marketplace.

C3 AI and AWS first partnered in 2016, and during the third quarter of fiscal year 2023, the company expanded and renewed its go-to-market partnership. In the third quarter of fiscal year 2023, AWS funded C3 AI to enhance C3 AI Law Enforcement optimized for AWS, integrating Amazon OpenSearch and AWS ML services to enhance the speed and quality of analysis for state and local agencies using the application on AWS.

C3 AI and Azure first partnered in 2018 to co-develop products and services for enterprise customers running on the Azure Infrastructure. The companies have collaborated to conduct co-marketing and co-selling strategies that rapidly scale distribution globally for their joint customers. In the third quarter of fiscal year 2023, the companies collaborated to close a global U.S. Energy company and a European technology company serving the construction and mining sectors. The company cooperated to deliver a highly successful pilot engagement to a large U.S. Defense Agency. All C3 AI Applications are available in the Azure Marketplace.

C3 AI and Booz Allen established a strategic partnership in fiscal year 2023 focused on providing strategic solutions into the Government, Defense, and Intelligence sectors. C3 AI and Booz Allen are jointly going to market with the C3 AI Platform and suite of pre-built C3 AI Applications. Together the companies have trained employees on the C3 AI Platform and have already closed their first deal with the DoD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.

C3 AI and Baker Hughes, a leading oilfield industrial services, equipment, and digital services company, entered into a strategic collaboration in June 2019 to operate as the exclusive channel partner and reseller of C3 AI Software in the oil and gas industry and a non-exclusive reseller in other industries. C3 AI agreed to provide additional products and services to Baker Hughes. The expanded agreement also provides Baker Hughes with a number of options to extend the term of the collaboration agreement beyond the initial five years.

As a result of the company’s partnership with Baker Hughes, joint selling, and the credibility it has brought the company in the market, C3 AI has closed several deals in the oil and gas and Chemical industry, including LyondellBasell, Shell, ExxonMobil, Petronas, ENI, Aramco, Qatar Gas, ADNOC, PTTGC, Yokogawa, Braskem, and others.

C3 AI and Raytheon Intelligence & Space, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies Corporation, announced a strategic alliance in 2020 to develop and operate AI solutions for government customers. Under terms of the alliance agreement, Raytheon Intelligence & Space work with C3 AI to offer disruptive solutions to defense missions, including Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO) through the U.S. Army Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) and aircraft condition-based maintenance for the U.S. Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO).

Sales Model

The company’s sales organization is organized both geographically and in vertical market sales units that cooperate to sell to and service customers. The company has a highly leveraged go-to-market model consisted of a global field sales force combined with significant alliance partnerships. Each of the company’s strategic partners—including AWS, Baker Hughes, ENGIE, FIS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Raytheon—has a large installed customer base with strong, established relationships, and a large global sales force that vastly extends the company’s market coverage. The company forms specific sales targets and goals with each partner, enabling the company to quickly and efficiently engage in customer accounts.

Early on, the company focused on the oil and gas, aerospace, defense, utilities, manufacturing, and financial services sectors, as those industries were early adopters in Enterprise AI. The company intends to expand into additional industries, such as high technology, telecommunications, retail, and precision medicine; and are seeing increased industry diversity in the company’s sales pipeline and pilot customer engagements.

Revenue Model

The company’s revenue consists of software subscription and professional services revenue. The substantial majority of the company’s revenue is generated from subscriptions to the company’s software.

Subscriptions

The company’s subscription revenue is primarily consisted of term agreements, stand-ready COE support services, trials and pilots of the company’s applications, and software-as-a-service offerings. Sales of the company’s term licenses grant its customers the right to use the company’s software, either on their own cloud instance or their internal hardware infrastructure, over the contractual term. The company also offers a premium stand-ready service through the company’s COE. Sales of the company’s software-as-a-service offerings include a right to use the company’s software over the contractual term. The company’s subscription contracts are generally non-cancellable and non-refundable. In addition, customers pay a usage-based runtime fee for the company’s C3 AI Software for specified levels of capacity. The company’s subscriptions also include its maintenance and support services, which include critical and continuous updates to the software that are integral to maintaining the intended utility of the software over the contractual term.

Professional Services

The company’s professional services primarily include implementation services, training and prioritized engineering services. The company maintains a professional services organization that offers resources, methodologies, and experience to help customers develop and deploy enterprise-scale AI applications. The company’s services are complemented by those of its partners.

C3 AI Implementation Services help ensure successful customer outcomes throughout the application development and deployment phases, including setup and configuration, ML model development and tuning, and integration of multiple complex source systems.

Prioritized engineering services are undertaken at the request of customers to accelerate the development of software features in C3 AI software products.

Marketing

The company’s multichannel marketing function is focused on market education, thought leadership, account-based marketing, and demand generation. The company engages the market through digital, print, and social media, virtual and physical events, including the company’s C3 AI Transform annual customer conference, and livestreamed events featuring C3 AI customers, C3 AI partners, and C3 AI experts in AI, ML, and data science.

IP

The company enjoy a rich patent portfolio that is a substantial competitive advantage, both offensive and defensive, in the Enterprise AI market—most notably, U.S. patents (No. 10,817,530 and No. 10,824,634), which were granted for systems and methods for data processing and enterprise AI applications.

As of April 30, 2023, the company’s technology was protected by a broad patent portfolio, with 16 issued patents in the United States, 12 issued counterpart patents in a number of international jurisdictions, over 37 patent applications pending in the United States, and 70 patent applications pending internationally. The company’s issued patents expire beginning in 2033 through 2039.

Growth Strategy

The company is investing in the expansion of its direct enterprise sales and service organization both geographically and across vertical markets to expand the use of C3 AI solutions within existing customers and establish new customer relationships.

The company’s release of the C3 Generative AI solutions in March 2023 is receiving considerable interest, and is a key part of the company’s growth strategy. The company closed three agreements for C3 Generative AI in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023 with large enterprises, and is working through a substantial pipeline of C3 Generative AI opportunities. The C3 AI generative application is available on both AWS Marketplace and the Google Cloud Marketplace.

The company continues to invest heavily in research and development to maintain technology leadership. The company’s product roadmap includes a wide range of new functions and products to be released in the coming years that the company expect to contribute to revenue growth with both new and existing customers.

History

C3.ai, Inc. was founded in 2009. The company was incorporated as a limited liability company in Delaware in 2009 and converted to a Delaware corporation in 2012.