All right, I'll keep the train rolling. The next presentation we have, we're super happy to have Stephen Ehikian, new chief. I'm just gonna say.
Yeah.
Chief Executive Officer of C3.ai. We're gonna look into the opportunity that C3.ai has in front of them. They're in a bit of a turnaround, so we'll get the update on that. Before we kick off the conversation, let me just go through some disclosures. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Stephen, welcome to the TMT conference.
Thank you very much.
Awesome. Congrats on the new role. To start, maybe you can give us a sense of what attracted you to the C3.ai opportunity, to start with.
Yeah. nice to be here. Right before this, I was leading a government agency, the General Services Administration. I came in to help fight fraud, waste, and abuse, and part of that effort within the GSA, if you don't know it, is really the intersection of all government spend. Procurement, common good and services, IT shared services, real estate portfolio of the government. It was an incredible opportunity, and we spent the first six months slimming down the government, headcount contracts. The next phase was the build back phase. I was kind of doing a lot of work investigating, like, what are the AI platforms that we wanna look in across the government? I knew the most common players, but then I saw a demo from C3, Akhil, and it just jumped off the page.
I'm like, "What's this?" I spent more time understanding the underlying technology and the use case in the federal government, and I saw a huge opportunity. For me, I'm very mission-driven. There was a couple big themes that I was really passionate about. One was driving the AI adoption. Like, I helped draft the AI Action Plan. A big part of winning that race is driving adoption throughout the federal government and through the major industries. Number two was this reindustrialization of America and how for national security, how do you bring back manufacturing? How do you think about supply chains? The third big piece was, how do you-- This is a more existential question. How do we get out of this debt crisis of the government?
I can tell you, it's really freaking hard to cut costs in the government. The only chance we have is to grow productivity. I think that's gonna be AI, automation, and robotics. I wanted to go to a company that could actually affect those big themes, and C3 AI was a perfect fit for that.
Yeah. That's a, that's a great introduction. With about six months under your belt, CEO, what insights can you share about C3.ai from an organizational standpoint, the technology, the product capabilities, market positioning? How has that shaped your strategic priorities going forward? We'll talk about, like, the plan in terms of the restructuring and what to focus on. But just in terms of just your, you know, customer conversations-
Yeah.
What stood out to you?
I've been here six months, and I've spent all that time on the road talking to our customers, partners, employees. What resoundingly I heard across the board was that when we actually focus on the right customers, industrial customers, the Federal Government, we demonstrate huge economic value, right? This isn't like my last company. We're solving a customer support bot. This is solving major core operations, supply chains, asset reliability for some of the biggest companies in the world. You know, think managing the contested logistics for the Navy to, you know, 10,000 critical infrastructure assets for Shell. I kept on hearing resoundingly, we demonstrate huge economic value. Okay, awesome. Number two, the density of talent at C3, the best I've been.
I've been in startups, I've been in government. This is the highest concentration of smart people who deeply care. We're in the office five days a week. It's an intense, you know, culture that deeply focus on, like, how do we help our customers win in AI? Those are the general themes. The other theme I heard, there's a lot going on in the market. There's a lot of noise. If I ask everybody in this room, what is an AI agent? What's an LLM? What's AI? What's machine learning? You're gonna get all different responses. If you talk to our customers, they're confused. They're like, there's so much being thrown at them. They've been piloting for the last year and a half. They're in pilot purgatory. They wanna move beyond that.
They're looking for trusted partners that actually done this at scale. That's a critique on us, but also the opportunity that I kind of was gonna double down into. Which if I can go to the next stage, like I've learned all this, but I'm like, cool, we're not performing the way we should be. Like, you know this, I know this. You know, from North America, EMEA, terrible. Like, I'm just looking at performance, not acceptable. Federal has been growing. I'll tell you what. When I landed, I immediately just plopped my butt in D.C. and said, "I have the value, best chance of affecting change in D.C.," given my background. What did I do? I removed layers of management. I had the sales team report directly to me. I'm deeply involved in the deal flows.
I'm reducing the cycle times from showing value. Before, it would take months to show value in a sales cycle. I'm like, "What can get done in a day, in a week?" That's the mentality right now, especially the new technologies we're building, and that's what customers wanna see. I'm gonna take that same playbook that's clearly working in federal and take that to North America and EMEA. Exactly what is that? That is gonna be focused on fewer applications. I think C3.ai started in the space of enterprise AI. I mean, they started the term, the category of enterprise AI, awesome, a decade ago. But they're not the only players today. You got Databricks, you got Anthropic, you got OpenAI, you got the hyperscalers talking about it.
I think that's validating, but also is gonna put pressure on us to say, where do you deserve the right to win? Like, you can't be a horizontal solution in this environment. For me, the big opportunity was, I know we've done 130 applications in the past, but we have the right to win in a very few number in the industrial space and the federal space. The most obvious thing for a beginner's mind coming in is like, double down to where you actually deserve the right to win, and you have the proof points. All the actions I've taken are based on that focus.
No, there's a lot of things that I wanna unpack there. You know, you unfortunately had to do a 26% headcount reduction, just given where the cost structure was. Can you talk to us about the details of the turnaround plan?
Mm-hmm.
More importantly, beyond the details, like, what do you want C3.ai to look like coming out of this, latest restructuring or reorganization?
Again, what led into this restructuring? I come in six months observing there's a lot of goodness. There's a lot there. The market's changing. The desire of focus is immediate. I'm like, "Okay, what are all the things that are tangential that aren't actually where we're number one in the market?" We have to downsize. Immediately what I said is, any product lines that aren't gonna be where we're gonna be number one in the market, we're gonna, you know, we'll maintain it for now, but we're not gonna continue to invest in that. There's associated sales teams associated with those products. Overall, I took a step back. We're burning too much cash. Like, I think a big part of my experience with government and before in startups, cash is critical.
Having a path to profitability is critical. I want that as much as you want that. Getting the cash burn restructuring cost was number one. Number two was flatten the organization. You know, I feel like I've come from startups, I've seen governments, we're probably somewhere around here. I wanna get closer to the leanness of a startup and the execution speed. When I saw that in federal, removing layers gets me closer to the customer, and the reaction time is critical. The layers reduced was part of that restructuring as well. The third is the focus. Product focus, fewer industrial applications where we solve, you know, deliver AI and automation across the value chain. Think manufacturing, oil and gas, energy, public sector. Anything outside of that is not a core focus anymore.
That is how we're gonna, you know, from a product perspective and a go-to-market perspective. The other thing is playing bigger. When federal, we're playing at a secretary level. We're playing bigger transformations for the government 'cause they need it. They don't have an alternative. They can't hire people back. We're just gonna do the same thing on the commercial side. Instead of just focusing on entry point, getting in the door, we're gonna get in the door with our pre-built applications, but paint a much broader transformation story that the CEOs are asking for. How do I have a zero back office supply chain? How do I maintain my tens of thousands of critical infrastructure without humans, you know, drowning in data? That's the focus right now.
The biggest thing, the last thing I wanna highlight is changing how you build with C3 AI. We have all the components, I can go into details of this, all the components to build a world-class enterprise AI application. How you build this, and this is where the speed of change in the last, I don't know, six months is probably been more than the last 30 years. How you build these is moving fast. I can highlight that, but I'm extremely excited for the ability for companies to go from a mission-critical idea to a mission-critical app, like, with very little downtime.
Understood. In terms of, like, the general timeline, 'cause I know it's hard to pinpoint this, but in terms of, one, getting back to top-line growth, and then two, that ultimate path to profitability, how are you thinking about those two objectives?
Well, I'm trying to do it as fast as possible. The headcount reduction was enacted. That's done. We have the cost reduction for non-payroll happening over the next couple quarters. We'll provide more guidance in 90 days. You know, the goal from the, you know, operating margins is to get back to what we've done historically. We'll come back with a timeline, you know, 30 days we haven't given, or 90 days we haven't given guidance on that yet. I want what you want. Like, that is immediate. I think we have $620 million bucks in the bank. We have a rock solid balance sheet, no debt. Preserving that is, like, critical in a time when things are changing and the ability to, like, double-click into what we do great is gonna be the focus.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. One of the things that stuck out to me in this period of turbulence, I would say, is just the velocity of the deceleration. That kind of goes to, you know, how, like. The goal of building more durable recurring revenue streams into the business models. I think there's a portion of the revenue that was coming from demo licenses and, you know, engineering services, which is great in the quarter, but not necessarily recurring. How are you thinking about building more of a, you know, recurring revenue stream into the model?
Yeah. It's a top priority. Like, when I think of what's important to me right now, it is focused on total bookings, RPO growth, and revenue.
Mm-hmm.
Thinking about long-term durability, like everything I've done, starting a company, even government, is like thinking 10 years at a time. My mindset is long-term durable growth, you know, getting the right customers on the right journey. You know, those are the three metrics I focus on now.
Mm-hmm. In terms of, like, the go-to-market, there's been, like, the pilots, converting pilots.
Yep.
into production customers. Is that still the sort of go-to-market play, or do you see that changing as well?
I wanna meet the customer where they wanna start.
Mm-hmm.
Meaning, like, we're gonna paint and provide a roadmap for how you can transform your business, whether it's supply chain, asset reliability, or contested logistics, in the federal government. I wanna also allow them to get started fast. If that's a pilot, if that's a two-day exercise, if that is six months, we'll accommodate them. The key is we're painting a much broader transformation story for the CEO because that's what's being asked for today versus trying to solve for the initial use case only. I think that's something in the past we get so focused on just trying to get deals through the door, you kind of miss that longer arc for the transformation that I feel like that is what's required today to win.
You mentioned this, you know, multiple times already but a place that I 100% agree with you is that C3 has been objectively doing very well in federal. A couple quarters ago, I think your bookings grew 89% year-over-year. It's been a big proportion of your total bookings. The backdrop is positive here. We got Commercial-Off-The-Shelf mandates. You mentioned the AI Action Plan, and other sort of initiatives. Maybe high level talk about what's so appealing, what is it about C3 that is so appealing to the federal government? Which of these various initiatives do you see as the most capitalizable opportunity?
What's happening in the backdrop? There's obviously there's a slimming down the government to control spend. There's a build backstage happening right now. There's pressure from the top to drive AI adoption to win this AI race geopolitically. There's also a big push to move away from GOTS solutions to COTS. There's the terms Commercial-Off-The-Shelf versus Government-Off-The-Shelf. Are you buying a commercial product that's repeatable, or are you asking an SI to custom code a product or even build it in-house even worse? 'Cause the government's not a software company. There's a huge mandate away from GOTS to a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf. C3 is one of those unique providers that actually has Commercial-Off-The-Shelf applications, right?
This is a big motivation as the government is literally forcing its agencies to adopt this. The other piece is for these contractors, the SIs, their business was GOTS. They go custom applications. We have a Strategic Integrator Program where they can actually take our platform and build a COTS solution on top of that. That's a huge opportunity right now that we're realizing. And I think just third, the scale of government deploying in some of the most complex environments in the world, on-prem, in their environments, on device, the high security, that's really hard, and that's something we've been doing for years. I think that's another accelerant for us. Ultimately, to answer your question, I think these are secretary-level initiatives now. These aren't just like individual, you know, the individual agencies.
It's secretaries are asking, "What's my AI roadmap?" They're really putting, you know, KPIs in place to drive AI adoption. It's a one place where probably the government is moving faster than commercial to adopt AI. I think for us, we started in the Defense Department of Intelligence. We most recently got pulled into the, you know, the civilian side. HHS was an example of that.
Mm-hmm.
I see civilian as a huge opportunity to continue to expand. This is my focus, make each one successful. Our success in HHS got us the DOE. DOE got us the USDA. You know, there's no competition other than ourselves in these moments in time, but I gotta make them successful.
Mm-hmm.
I think these are opportunities to grow those accounts. I mean, if you can solve HHS, reduce the cost of healthcare in the country, how much is that worth?
Mm-hmm.
As an example.
I mean, you guys have also won, like, I think, a $450 million Air Force contract expansion, which, it sort of brings up the point that you obviously have a competitor that does really, really well.
Mm.
in Palantir and Federal. Do you sense a need to, for the, for the DOD or the Department of War or Fed more broadly to diversify a wave or not put too many eggs in one basket? What kind of opportunity does that represent for C3?
Yeah. I don't see I mean, it's not like the government's asking for that at all. That's not been explicit. When you have a market where clearly they're doing exceptionally well, clearly there's a demand for the product, always inherently you wanna see other players in the market to have optionality. I think you are seeing that in the government today. I think we are a clear option today and provide the ability to not be overly dependent on any one vendor. Now we can both win. That's fine. Clearly I think what's been shown is the government wants enterprise AI. They want large scale transformations using AI, and we have an opportunity to deliver on that.
When you think about government, overall, there's also the state and local, which I think also has been an area of strength. Is that still an area of focus of the company, or is it gonna be primarily, a Fed and industrial opportunity?
Yeah.
A place for state and local as well?
Overall public sector is a focus.
Mm-hmm.
I think a lot of things we're doing at Federal directly applies to the state and local level. A lot of the work around fraud, waste, and abuse reduction, healthcare initiatives we're doing are gonna directly apply. We have a property appraisal application. Yes, very much so.
Let's talk about the partner ecosystem and the go-to-market strategy. You guys are going into year two of the relationship with Microsoft. I think it delivered $130 million in bookings and 100+ customer agreements, you know, in the first year. Give us the state of the relationship with that Microsoft partnership. When we think about those bookings, what's the timeline of those bookings converting into revenue?
Yeah. The relationship is incredibly strong. Like it's incredibly strategic relationship for C3. I think where we're complementary itself, it's very complementary. Microsoft provides very horizontal services for AI. We provide very vertical-focused applications. That combination in a world that's getting more focused, is an accelerant. You know, there are a majority of our bookings today, is through this partnership. In terms of conversion, we'll provide guidance. We don't break that out, but-
Mm.
That will accelerate in the future.
When we think about the partner contributions to bookings, that's been a pretty high percentage. I think in a couple quarters ago, it was like 90%, flowing through your partners. How do you balance like driving a lot of partner source revenue versus kind of building the muscle of your own sales teams? I think you mentioned here that, you know, you're involved in deals, which is great because of your background and the focus in Fed. In terms of building a durable sales motion, what initiatives do you have in place to improve like AE performance and quota attainment?
The partnerships are an accelerant. It does not replace the need to be able to direct, directly sell our product internally. That is the number one focus right now, organic growth through our sales team. How am I doing this? Replicating what's doing in Federal. Getting much more involved in executive leader, leadership to the customer. You know, reducing the sales time. Reducing the time to demonstrate value or demonstrate insights. This is a fairly new motion we're implementing. In Federal, we started doing this in Q2. We can take the same playbook into, you know, North America and EMEA, but it's the how you take from the first meeting, can we show value within 30 minutes? Because I think a year ago, we were having these conversations. What about hallucination risk? You know, can we trust our data in these models?
Those conversations are not happening at all anymore. It's now, it's not an if, it is how fast can we get started. This is our mindset's got to shift. We did this in Federal. We're able to go from literally a first conversation to a closed deal in less than 30 days. How do we replicate that in North America and EMEA? It's a mindset shift, maybe a skill re-enablement shift, but that is my 100% focus because the partners will be an accelerant on top of that.
Mm-hmm.
We got to figure out the actual sales motion at C3.
Yeah. I mean, it makes a ton of sense. Let's talk a little bit, this is sort of financial questions, but it's really around, you know, getting back to profitability and building a durable business. Gross margins at once upon a time used to be in the 70s, now it's in the mid-50s, which, you know, this kind of reflects the ramp of initial production deployments and to support some investments. How do we get some gross margins back up to where you want them to be? Because, yeah, if you have more gross margins, it increases your ability to invest. When you think about where you are today on gross margins and where you'd like to be, what's the path?
Yeah. Growth. You got to drive revenue. It's in bookings growth, RPO growth, then revenue. How do you do this? It's gonna be the focus for the sales, which is larger AI transformations, larger deal sizes. The IPD motion, how we've done this historically is still important. The quality IPDs is the most important thing. IPD is Integrated Project Delivery. These are almost of, not proof of concepts, but actually production-grade deployments for the customer. That's incredibly important. I think before we focused on volume, now it's gonna be quality. Higher quality will convert at a much bigger number.
Mm-hmm.
Growth, the only answer to that question, I wanna get back to the historical means. We haven't provided a guidance for when we do this, but what you want on this.
Yeah. No, I think you made an important point is that, you know, the last couple of years we've been talking about the number of Integrated Project Delivery, the metric that I track in my model.
Yeah.
Looking that on a year-over-year basis. Your point is that not solve for volume, but for quality.
Correct.
What's the profile? What is a.
Yeah.
-IPD and what is it a specific type of use case that C3 can only do? Is it a particular industry focus? Is it the size of customer?
Yeah.
What defines a good IPD?
Yeah. Let's take the customer profile. I think that the world is the Fortune 1000s in the public sector space. That's defined. It's use cases we have deserved the right to win. Industrial applications, think asset reliability, predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, core back office for some of the biggest companies in the world, solving value across the business value chain. Think for manufacturing, oil and gas, energy, healthcare, and federal.
Mm-hmm.
If I can just focus, we have clear abilities. We're number one. Now, just like say no to everything else, 'cause there's so much opportunity when you get into a deal cycle. How do you qualify the pipeline just being that?
Mm-hmm.
You size a company, use cases, and be able to kind of get started fast. That's by the ICP I define as.
Yeah, that makes sense. Let's move the conversation to how AI impacts C3's businesses. software announcement in 2026.
Yep.
Every single company that I cover, whether they're a seat-based model or a consumption model or a data platform, all of that's being questioned now, given the concerns around potential disintermediation from AI. When we think about potential competitions, whether it's from startups or the model providers or the research labs or the hyperscalers, what should investors keep in mind about what C3 AI offers and what prevents competitors or customers using agentic solutions from model providers from replicating what C3.ai does?
The number one thing everyone's looking for is economic value. That is a term you're gonna be hearing more and more. I'm hearing Anthropic talking about it, Databricks talking about it. With AI, is it pricing? The pricing hasn't been nailed in terms of is it a seat or usage. I can concretely say everyone's saying, what economic value you delivering? Do you have proof points to show that? You can back into the value based on this. How do you go do this and who can deliver economic value? It is in Silicon Valley, there's this, you know, belief that you can vibe code these solutions that LLMs are gonna commoditize enterprise AI.
I think that just fundamentally misunderstates or misunderstands the difference between predicting the next word of a sentence or the next line of code and predicting financial and physical outcomes for a business. You know, are LLMs competitors? Absolutely not. We partner with the LLMs. We're agnostic to them. We actually orchestrate them. So where I feel like these LLMs, these models are phenomenal describing the world beautifully, and they reason beautifully, but they don't actually affect the outcomes, right? We operationalize these models.
I think that's the biggest thing when I package what is C3 AI, is taking this beautiful reasoning and world knowledge and applying domain-specific experience with the integrations, with the toolings, with the domain, you know, change management to actually transform a global supply chain or manage a critical assets for one of the large E&P companies or the contested logistics for the Navy. These are areas where I feel it's very complimentary. I think there's a lot of confusion, as I said earlier.
Mm-hmm.
I think CEOs are confused, CFOs are confused. They've been doing pilots for a year. You've been hearing about the whole pilot purgatory. But ultimately, if you can show actual economic value, if you have customers that can reference that is where you're gonna be able to drive growth. When I think about C3, we have a select area. We have clear lighthouse accounts, you know, Shell, Cargill, Dow, federal government. I'm like, leverage that, tell that story, and repeat it.
Mm-hmm.
It's that, like, back to foundational principles.
I mean, I 100% agree with you in terms of we're not gonna write code a supply chain optimization solution. That's really complicated stuff. Well, actually, can I actually ask in this room, who's bought a Mac mini in the last 30 days? Right? Okay.
How, you know, I asked you, how easy was that to set up?
Not easy.
Okay. There's this perception that you can just over the weekend-- By the way, what's happening? You can buy a Mac mini, you can download a current model. You have supercomputer-level capabilities in the hands of somebody who's smart to construct this, and you can build autonomous agents. That's the vision, the pitch. It's not that easy. Also, you're gonna connect this to all your files, your emails, your personal information. There's no security. These are open-source models. You see how fast it's evolving. Now I'm thinking, now take that same approach, but if you have the, I don't know, enterprise alignment and guardrails, you're gonna want that same capability to launch inside the enterprise.
If you're gonna take somebody who is a trusted partner that actually is able to protect your data, have audibility, and do this at scale, that's a really freaking hard problem.
Mm-hmm.
I'm gonna say the market's evolving quickly. You're seeing where it's going. I think let's not discount what it takes to go from a nice proof of concept of a weekend or a pilot to actually production-grade enterprise.
It's also hard when the SaaS providers block access to the APIs.
Oh, that's real?
Okay. That also can be a roadblock. The angle where it's going is that, like, you know, I think we both agree that, you know, the sort of vibe coding disruption risk is probably overstated. The nuanced angle that I get from a lot of institutional investors, like, we get that, you know, a lot of systems of records aren't going away, a lot of software's gonna stick around. The potential proliferation of alternatives more broadly, does that just sort of erode on pricing power and put more pressure on business models? I think that's kind of where the conversation, at least I've had with my companies, that sort of evolved too. Love to get your perspective on that.
Yeah. When I was building a CRM and customer support solutions, there was a big obsession around being the single pane of glass, being the interface where humans, sales reps, marketers, service agents are interacting with. That was the power grab, having everything in one place. Now the question is, what is the primary interface? If it's agents are the primary interface, how important is that single pane of glass?
Mm-hmm.
The question is, if that's being questioned, what's the value of a CRM or an ERP system or an ITSM? I think that's all evolving. I think, concretely, there's gonna be applications of the past have been mapped to departments.
Mm-hmm.
CRM for sales. You have marketing automation. Where's the future going? There's gonna be much more orchestration of work across departments, right? Where you have these agents thinking. You have humans definitely on the loop of all this, but there's gonna be work done across departments. I think that's gonna question the moat of some of these legacy providers, but also reinforce because they see the same thing. They're gonna be installing agents. They're gonna be promoting themselves cross-functionally as well. I think there's gonna be a disaggregation in terms of the value. I think there's a grab in terms of who can orchestrate work.
Mm-hmm.
I think, you know, where our thesis is we wanna be the enterprise application layer for specific industrial workflows where we can help orchestrate work across the value chain for specific use cases.
Makes sense. In our last couple of minutes, I wanted to sort of get your perspective on C3 versus some of its closest competitors, whether it's Palantir or Databricks. I mean, these companies have proven that they can grow incredibly fast at multi-billion dollar scale in the enterprise AI market. Some of them have also achieved incredible levels of profitability. I guess the question is like, what are your competitors doing that C3 hasn't? Maybe more importantly, when you look at your competitors, what are things that you can take away from them that you can incorporate into the plan, into the operating model, that can, you know, set you on a similar path?
Yeah. The answer is yes. There's, you know, these companies are doing successfully, very successfully proven the, you know, roadmap how to go do it. For me, it's gonna be about focusing on playing bigger, right? What's working federal, playing at the secretary level of a broad AI transformation story using AI and automation across the value chain, having a methodology how to go do that, number one. Playing bigger at C-suite conversation. Number two is speed of execution. How do you go from an idea or the first conversation to value or insights? You know, that is something. It shouldn't take six months. What can get done in the first conversation? What can get done in the first day or the first week?
That's the mindset I'm gonna have and bring back to the company, which is the speed of execution and delivery of value.
Mm-hmm.
'Cause again, everyone's looking for economic value. We have the proof points. How do we condense or compress that time window? That's where I feel like our competitors are doing a great job of. I think we have a huge opportunity to do this very similar. Let's not lose sight of where do we win. I don't wanna be everything to everyone. Industrial applications, Federal Government, this is where I think we have a clear opportunity. Focus.
Okay.
First principle of thinking, focus, focus. All you know this. You know this. I need to execute on this. That's my job.
Awesome. I totally agree with the focus point. My last question is, you know, given how the share price has reacted to the performance over the last two or three quarters, how is the team planning to, like, restore investor confidence? Obviously, it's gonna come through execution of the plan. Maybe just, you know, paint us the picture of, you know, hopefully, you'll join us this time next year for the TMT conference. In a year from now, like, what is the landscape and what do you hope the conversation around C3.ai will be-
Yeah.
a year from now?
A couple things are happening right now. Yes, we have a lot of work to do. Yes, we reduced headcount by 26%. What's happening internally? 'Cause I've been here six months, and I'm like, for a company in Silicon Valley building AI solutions, the use of AI internally was very limited, honestly. Three months ago, we're like, "Okay, coding agents are real. I've been using these for the last couple years. Wide adoption." That was the first immediate thing we started doing, adopting AI. You talk to developers, even the most seasoned developers who love the craftsmanship of coding, they don't code much anymore. You say, "How much productivity have you gotten?" 10x would be the answer, right? I'm like, "Okay, how do I apply that across every de-department?" Marketing, we're trying to launch a new website.
That would be 9-12 months and millions of bucks. I said, "What can get done in 48 hours?" Literally the team in between planning for our user conference tomorrow, we had Davos a couple of weeks ago. They literally created a brand new website leveraging our, you know, our brands and our positioning beautifully. It's just when you think of the productivity, 10x, 100x, that's the achievement I want to get because if we can show how C3 AI is a gleaming example of how to, you know, AI-fy your business, we can showcase that our customers and can get all of our team understanding, our sales reps understanding the power of it. That's number one, is how we kinda change how we operate. Number two is how our customers are building enterprise applications.
That's gonna be a big piece of the next 12 months. It's decreasing the time from this, you know, you have a mission-critical idea, and you wanna launch this to a mission-critical app. That should be compressed immediately. How you do that is all this investment we've made over the years, which is our data integrations, our ontology layers, our agentic execution layers, our interaction layer. That is what we spent years building, and that's not throwaway. That is all positive in order to actually deliver the future where you have autonomous agents running around the department automating a supply chain.
Mm.
That would be the goal, is how do you actually provide an autonomous operations for, you know, our customers, and then how C3 actually reduced headcount and went faster over 12 months.
Awesome. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for giving us the update on C3. Congrats on becoming the new CEO. Best of luck on the customer conference. Looking forward to seeing
better days ahead at C3. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Awesome.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
Great job. Thank you.