Welcome to an extended edition, episode 71, of the Acceleration Economy Minute, in which Kieron Allen connects with Tom Siebel, who is chairman and CEO of C3 AI. He’s also a software industry legend by way of the eponymous, category-defining Siebel Systems which was eventually acquired by Oracle.
C3 AI is on the Acceleration Economy Top 10 Shortlist of AI/Hyperautomation Enablers. A profile of C3 AI will publish Thursday, April 13.
Register here for your on-demand pass to view all content from Partners Ecosystem Digital Summit. The digital event, which took place on April 20, focused on analyzing the business and IT imperatives around cloud, AI, automation, data modernization, and cybersecurity that define the future of partnerships.
Highlights
01:21 — Siebel recounts the founding and history of C3 AI and its original mission, noting that it has invested about $1.5 billion in building a foundational software stack that allows it to “design, develop, provision, and operate” large-scale enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and also built 42 turnkey applications for gas, utilities, manufacturing, aerospace, telcos, precision health, and more.
02:00 — When C3 AI started, AWS, Microsoft/Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as big data, were all very small. He notes the field of data science has come a long way and is now being accelerated by generative AI. “We’ve been talking about this for about 14 years and now everybody in the world is talking about it every day,” he says. “So it turned out to be a pretty good guess.”
Which companies are the most important vendors in AI and hyperautomation? Check out the Acceleration Economy AI/Hyperautomation Top 10 Shortlist.
03:15 — Discussing C3 AI’s differentiators, he notes that other AI-driven products are highly technical; customers need to understand algorithms or pipelines or virtualization. C3 AI did the work so customers don’t need to worry about all those details and they can just buy applications such as anti-money laundering (AML). For the past 15 years, customers have been trying to build applications from various piece parts, and he uses the analogy of assembling a car from a set of parts. “We’re in the solution business and I would say the other people are in the piece parts and tools businesses.”
05:43 — Siebel shares his views on training and skills development, as well as whether AI will eliminate jobs. The company employs about 950 people. Last year the company had 92,000 job applicants. C3 AI believes strongly in continuing education. In an indication of how quickly the AI field is moving and evolving, “employees are technically obsolete the day they show up from MIT,” he says. Re-educating (vs. replacing) workers “is much more humane and actually much more effective.”
09:34 — Explaining why customers select C3 AI, Siebel says they are looking to solve an economic pain point. C3 AI offers applications for supply chain optimization that can understand large, complex global supply chains and apply AI to ensure companies have the right number of parts in the right place at the right time so they can deliver their product on time and in full to the customer.
12:24 — Addressing Generative AI, Siebel says C3 AI is using Large Language Models, or LLMs, to fundamentally change the nature of the human-computer interface. Also, the company continues to expand and hire: it will grow from 40-plus applications today to 200 or so. “Unlike other companies in the information technology business that way, way over-hired in the last few years, we didn’t do that. So we’re not facing these layoffs that you’re reading about every day. Now with the levels of interest in enterprise AI becoming just acute, this is working out, it’s getting pretty interesting.”
