Founded and led by Silicon Valley veteran entrepreneur Tom Siebel, C3 AI is an Enterprise AI application software company. C3 AI delivers a family of fully integrated products, including the C3 AI Application Platform, an end-to-end platform for developing, deploying, and operating enterprise AI applications, and 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.
The C3 AI Application Platform, C3 AI Applications, and its patented model-driven architecture enable organizations to simplify and accelerate Enterprise AI application development, deployment, and administration. C3 AI primarily has a subscription-based business model.
The 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, reducing the effort and complexity of the Enterprise AI software engineering problem.
What does C3 Ai do?
Enterprise AI Software Solutions
C3 AI has built a single, integrated solution that enables customers to rapidly develop, deploy, and operate large-scale Enterprise AI applications across any infrastructure. Customers can deploy C3 AI applications on all major public cloud infrastructures, private cloud or hybrid environments, or directly on their servers and processors.
C3 AI provides its customers and partners with an antidote to AI vendor lock-in. C3 AI offers five (5) primary families of software solutions, which C3 AI collectively refers to as C3 AI Software:
C3 AI Application Platform
C3 AI Application Platform offers end-to-end platform-as-a-service allowing customers to design, develop, provision, and operate Enterprise AI applications at scale. Customers can use the C3 AI Application Platform to build and operate their own custom Enterprise AI applications and to customize, operate, and manage C3 AI Applications.
The C3 AI Application 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 Application Platform enables C3 Ai and its customers to develop Enterprise AI applications by using conceptual models of all the elements required by the application—e.g., data objects, computing resources, data processing services, AI and machine learning services —instead of having to write complex, lengthy code.
C3 AI Applications
C3 AI Applications is an expanding portfolio of turnkey, ready-to-use, cross-industry, and industry-specific Enterprise AI applications that address a range of mission-critical, high-value use cases. With C3 AI Applications, organizations can typically deploy production AI applications in one to six months. Each of these applications is extensible and customizable to meet customer requirements.
Cross-industry applications include Inventory Optimization, Supply Network Risk, Customer Churn Management, Production Schedule Optimization, Predictive Maintenance, Fraud Detection, and Energy Management.
C3 AI also offers integrated families of turnkey Enterprise AI applications to serve the needs of a growing list of vertical market segments, including oil and gas, chemicals, utilities, manufacturing, financial services, defense, intelligence, aerospace, healthcare, retail, and telecommunications. For each of these vertical markets, C3 AI has deployed or is planning to deploy a complete family of integrated AI applications to address the entire value chain of each industry.
C3 AI Ex Machina
C3 AI Ex Machina is a no-code solution that provides 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 Application Platform, typically as the primary tool used by non-developer business analysts to build, train, and tune models on the C3 AI Application Platform.
C3 AI CRM
C3 AI CRM is an industry-specific CRM solution that lets customers apply the full power of Enterprise AI to their existing CRM systems. The C3 AI CRM product family includes sales, marketing, and customer service functionality.
The products will be available in vertical market-specific offerings specifically designed to meet the needs of industries such as financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, oil and gas, manufacturing, utilities, aerospace, automotive, public sector, defense, and intelligence.
C3 AI Data Vision
C3 AI Data Vision is an AI-powered knowledge and insight product that enables advanced network and temporal analytics through a visual and interactive workflow-enabled interface.
What is the business model of C3 AI?
Value Proposition
- Scale AI Across the Business: Customers can use AI applications and models that optimize processes for every product, asset, customer, or transaction across all regions and businesses
- Deliver Results Faster: Customers can deploy AI applications and see results in one to two quarters and rapidly roll out additional applications and new capabilities;
- Generate Meaningful Value: Customers can unlock sustained value, up to hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year, from reduced costs, increased revenue, and higher margins; and
- Govern AI with Confidence: Customers can ensure systematic, enterprise-wide governance of AI with C3 AI’s unified platform that offers data lineage and model governance.
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Partner Ecosystem
C3 AI has established strategic relationships with technology leaders, including Amazon Web Services, Baker Hughes, ENGIE, Fidelity National Information Services, FIS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Raytheon. These world-leading companies can marshal tens of thousands of talented resources to establish and serve small, medium, and large C3 AI customer relationships on a global scale.
C3 AI forms go-to-market and product co-development alliances with its partners that combine its Enterprise AI expertise and technology with partners’ deep domain expertise to bring next-generation C3 AI solutions to joint customers. C3 AI’s partnerships include strategic alliances across four categories:
- Industry Partners: Each industry partnership focuses on a key vertical. C3 AI has formed global strategic alliances in the energy industry with France-based global energy leader ENGIE; in oil and gas with Baker Hughes, a global leader in oilfield services; in financial services with FIS, a leading technology provider to the global financial services industry; and in the U.S. Federal and aerospace sectors with Raytheon, one of the world’s largest aerospace and defense manufacturers.
- Hyperscale Cloud and Infrastructure Partners: C3 AI has formed global strategic go-to-market alliances with hyperscale cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. In addition, C3 AI has strategic alliances with leading hardware infrastructure providers to deliver C3 AI’s software optimized for their technology, such as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Intel.
- Consulting and Services: C3 AI has established partnerships with select specialized systems integrators that provide application design and development, data engineering, data science, and systems integration services, including Aubay, BGP, Grupo CMC, Data Reply, Infoedge Technology, Informatica El Corte Ingles, Intelia, Ortec, and Pariveda.
- Independent Software Vendors: C3 AI’s Independent Software Vendors, or ISV, partners develop, market, and sell application solutions that are natively built on or tightly integrated with the C3 AI Application Platform.
Sales Model
C3 AI’s sales organization is organized both geographically and into vertical market segments that cooperate in selling to and servicing customers. C3 AI has a highly leveraged go-to-market model comprised of a global field sales force combined with significant alliance partnerships to accelerate its entry into diverse global market segments.
Each of the strategic partners—including AWS, Baker Hughes, ENGIE, FIS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Raytheon—has a large, installed customer base with strong, established relationships and an extensive global sales force that vastly extends the market coverage. C3 AI forms specific sales targets and goals with each partner, enabling C3 Ai to quickly and efficiently engage in customer accounts.
Hybrid Business Strategy of IBM
Historically, C3 AI’s strategy has been to achieve early leadership with a focus on large enterprise sales to establish successful lighthouse customers across various industries and geographies. C3 AI’s goal is to rapidly move down-market in the next few years to capture each industry’s small and medium business segments.
C3 AI’s typical sales cycle begins with one or more product and technical presentations about C3 AI, leading to a mapping of C3 AI’s capabilities to customer use cases. This frequently leads to a paid trial lasting eight to 16 weeks. During that period, C3 AI deploys a production-level application representative of the customer’s Enterprise AI and digital transformation requirements.
After completing a successful trial, customers will frequently license one or more C3 AI Applications. Either concurrent with or subsequent to licensing C3 AI Applications, some customers will license additional C3 AI Applications or the C3 AI Application Platform.
Revenue Model
C3 AI generated $266.8 Million in FY23. C3 AI’s revenue consists of subscription and professional services revenue. C3 AI primarily has a subscription-based business model. Subscriptions include software, maintenance, and support services. C3 AI’s professional services primarily include implementation services, training, and prioritized engineering services.
Subscription Revenue: Subscription revenue is primarily comprised of term licenses, stand-ready COE support services, trials of applications, and software-as-a-service offerings. C3 AI’s subscriptions also include maintenance and support services, which include critical and continuous updates to the software that is integral to maintaining the intended utility of the software. Subscription revenue accounted for 82% of the total revenue in FY22.
Professional Services Revenue: Professional services revenue primarily includes implementation services, training, and prioritized engineering services, including training, application design, project management, system design, data modeling, data integration, application design, development support, data science, and application and C3 AI Software administration support.
