C3.ai, Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) software solutions, serving a global clientele across North America, Europe, the ...
C3.ai, Inc. is a publicly traded enterprise AI software company headquartered at 1300 Seaport Boulevard in Redwood City, California. Founded in 2009 by Thomas M. Siebel, the company was initially established as C3 IoT and later adopted the name C3.ai, Inc. in 2019. It completed its initial public offering on ...C3.ai, Inc. is a publicly traded enterprise AI software company headquartered at 1300 Seaport Boulevard in Redwood City, California. Founded in 2009 by Thomas M. Siebel, the company was initially established as C3 IoT and later adopted the name C3.ai, Inc. in 2019. It completed its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2020 under the ticker symbol AI. Thomas M. Siebel remains the company’s founder, chairman, and chief executive officer.
The company’s primary business is providing software that helps large organizations develop, deploy, operate, and scale artificial intelligence applications. Its central offering has evolved into the C3 Agentic AI Platform, formerly described as the C3 AI Application Platform. The platform is designed to connect enterprise data sources, support machine-learning and generative-AI workflows, manage models and applications, and deliver AI capabilities through reusable services. C3 AI also offers development and analytical tools such as C3 AI Studio, C3 AI Ex Machina, C3 AI CRM, and C3 AI Data Vision. These products are intended to reduce the time, engineering effort, and infrastructure expense required to build production-grade enterprise AI systems.
In addition to its platform, C3 AI sells prebuilt applications addressing specific operational and commercial use cases. Examples include inventory optimization, supply-network risk management, customer churn management, production-schedule optimization, predictive maintenance, fraud detection, energy management, and other applications for asset performance, supply chains, customer relationships, and regulatory or mission-critical operations. The company’s customers and target markets include oil and gas, chemicals, utilities, manufacturing, financial services, defense, intelligence, aerospace, healthcare, and telecommunications.
C3 AI follows an enterprise software model in which revenue is generated primarily through software subscriptions, application agreements, platform usage, and related professional services. The economic value proposition is based on helping customers improve productivity, forecast failures, reduce operating costs, optimize assets and inventory, strengthen risk controls, and make better use of existing data. Its cost structure is heavily weighted toward research and development, sales and marketing, cloud infrastructure, customer implementation, and employee compensation. The supplied trailing figures show substantial investment in research and development and selling, general, and administrative activities, alongside negative operating cash flow and net losses, indicating that the company continues to prioritize growth, product development, and market expansion over near-term profitability.
The company maintains strategic and technology relationships with organizations including AWS, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Baker Hughes, FIS, and Raytheon. These alliances support cloud deployment, industry distribution, computing infrastructure, and customer access. With approximately 764 full-time employees, C3 AI falls within the 501-1000 employee category. Its principal strategic objective is to expand adoption of enterprise AI and agentic AI, deepen industry-specific solutions, convert customer experimentation into production deployments, and ultimately achieve durable recurring revenue growth and improved operating leverage.
YoYYoY means Year-over-Year. It compares the latest annual value with the previous annual value to show long-term trend strength.
QoQQoQ means Quarter-over-Quarter. It compares the latest quarter with the immediately previous quarter to show short-term momentum changes.
RevenueThe total money that came through the front door from selling things, before paying a single bill. Think of it as the grand total of every credit card swipe from customers. (YoY compares this year to last year's performance, while QoQ compares the current three months to the previous three).
$250.3M
-35.7%
+1.5%
Net IncomeThe absolute bottom line. If the company paid every single supplier, employee, banker, and tax collector, this is the actual money left in their pocket at the end of the day.
$-470.4M
-62.9%
+19.7%
Gross MarginThe basic markup. If they sell a $100 pair of sneakers, this percentage tells you how much of that price tag is profit right after paying for the rubber and shoelaces, but before paying for things like store rent or TV commercials.
+30.9%
-49.0%
+45.0%
Operating MarginThe 'day job' efficiency score. Out of every dollar a customer spends, this shows how many cents the company keeps after making the product AND paying for all the everyday corporate overhead (like salaries, marketing, and keeping the lights on).
-194.9%
-133.7%
+12.3%
Net MarginThe final take-home percentage. When you strip away every conceivable cost, tax, and interest payment, this is the exact number of cents the company truly gets to keep from every dollar in sales.
-187.9%
-153.3%
+20.9%
Free Cash FlowThe holy grail of corporate cash. It's the spendable, physical money left over after the business pays for its daily operations AND buys the big, expensive upgrades (like new factories or servers) it needs to survive. This is the 'free' money they can use to pay dividends or buy back stock.
$-190.7M
-329.0%
+103.9%
FCF MarginThe ultimate cash conversion rate. It shows how good the company is at turning regular sales directly into cold, hard, spendable cash. A high percentage means the business is an absolute cash-printing machine.
-76.2%
-567.0%
+103.8%
Debt / EquityThe financial risk gauge. It compares how much of the company's empire was built using borrowed money (loans) versus the owners' own money (shareholders). A high number means they are heavily leveraged and playing a riskier game; a low number means they are playing it safe.
0.9%
+49.1%
-100.0%
Current RatioThe 12-month survival check. It simply compares the cash they have right now (plus things they can quickly turn into cash) against the immediate bills they absolutely must pay this year. A score above 1 means they have enough in the wallet to cover the upcoming bills without panicking.
6.64x
-3.1%
-7.3%
Total AssetsThe absolute size of the company's empire. It bundles together absolutely everything of value they own—from the cash in the register and the inventory in the warehouse, to the software patents in the vault and the factories on the ground.
Operator: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the C3 AI Fiscal First Quarter 2027 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. And now I'd like to hand the call over to today's host, Amit Berry. Please go ahead.
Amit Berry: Good afternoon and welcome to C3 AI's earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2027, which ended on July 31, 2026. My name is Amit Berry and I lead Investor Relations at C3 AI. With me on the call today are Tom Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Hitesh Lath, Chief Financial Officer. After the market closed today, we issued a press release with details regarding our first quarter results, which can be accessed through the Investor Relations section on our website at ir.c3.ai. This call is being webcast, and a replay will be available on our IR website following the conclusion of the call. During today's call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking under federal securities laws. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be considered representative of our views as of any subsequent date. We disclaim any obligation to update forward-looking statements or outlook. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For a further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our filings with the SEC. All figures will be discussed on a non-GAAP basis unless otherwise noted. Also, during today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures, to the extent reasonably available, is included in our press release. Finally, at times in our prepared remarks, in response to your questions, we may discuss metrics that are incremental to our usual presentation to give greater insight into the dynamics of our business or our quarterly results. Please be advised that we may or may not continue to provide this additional detail in the future. And with that, let me turn the call over to Tom.
Thomas Siebel: Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Three months ago, I returned as Chief Executive Officer with a mandate to turn this company around. I returned as CEO because the company was candidly underperforming despite every advantage. The product offerings are exceptional. The market is huge and rapidly growing, and the balance sheet is rock solid. None of that was the problem. The problem was execution. And 1 quarter into the turnaround, I believe the company is on track. In the past 3 months, we have restored fundamental management discipline to this business. We completely restructured the company. We restructured sales. We restructured products. We restructured services. We reset the cost structure, driving massive costs out of the …