According to an IDC report, the global revenues for the artificial intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services, are estimated to grow 16% in 2021 to $327.5 billion. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17% to over $550 billion by 2024. Tom Siebel’s C3.ai (NYSE: AI) is capturing this high-growth market through partnerships and product innovation.

C3.ai’s Financials

C3.ai’s third-quarter revenues grew 26% to $52.3 million, ahead of the market’s estimate of $50.5 million. Adjusted loss per share of $0.24 surpassed the Street’s estimates of loss of $0.29 per share.

Its subscription revenues grew 17% to $43.1 million. Professional service revenues grew 89% to $9.2 million.

For the fiscal year, revenues grew 17% to $183.2 million.

For the fourth quarter, C3.ai forecast revenues of $50-$52 million, compared with the market’s forecast of $51.16 million. For the full year, C3.ai forecast revenues of $243-$247 million compared with the market forecast of $245.4 million.

C3.ai’s Offerings

During the quarter, C3.ai announced its partnership with the ERP technology cloud leader Infor for expanding enterprise-class AI solutions across industries. The partnership will help extend Infor’s native machine learning capabilities as well.

Additionally, C3.ai also established its partnership with the Singtel subsidiary NCS, to deliver enterprise AI solutions to customers in Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. This was its first strategic partnership in the telecommunications industry. C3.ai plans to leverage the partnership to deliver solutions across multiple industries including telecommunications, government, financial services, and transportation.

Additionally, it also expanded its Open Energy AI Initiative, an open marketplace for C3 AI energy applications, built-in collaboration with Shell and Microsoft. The Open Energy AI Initiative aims to accelerate the deployment and availability of enterprise AI solutions to the energy industry by providing a framework for players in the industry and offering them interoperable solutions powered by the C3 AI Suite and Microsoft Azure.

Besides partnerships, C3.ai extended its investment in C3 AI CRM, the first enterprise-class, AI-first CRM solution custom-built for industries that have been developed in partnership with Microsoft and Adobe. As part of the solution, the company released new precision sales forecasting capabilities to improve forecasting accuracy for sales teams and executives. C3 AI CRM leverages relevant economic indicators such as the stock market indices, commodity prices, inflation, interest rates, and others along with company-specific information such as M&A and share repurchases. It analyses these data sets with the traditional CRM data to develop rich AI models that deliver precise revenue forecasting, accurate product forecasting, next-best product, next best offer, and customer churn prediction.

It also released C3 AI v7.19 and v7.20, announced new features and enhancements such as the new advanced AutoML capabilities in its no-code AI and analytics platform C3 AI Ex Machinia. It also launched C3 AI UI Designer in its C3 AI Integrated Design Studio.

AI software requires domain-specific models for each domain that C3 wants to play in. Currently, its strength is in the Energy sector where it has built significant credibility. It will take some time for the rest of the models to be built, trained on live data sets, and applied to broader customer bases across telecom, manufacturing, retail, etc. Tom Siebel knows the game very well, and in my consideration, C3 is a long-term bet on the AI trend.

C3.ai’s stock is currently trading at $59.99 with a market capitalization of $6.20 billion. It touched a 52-week high of $183.90 in December last year. The stock had fallen to a 52-week low of $47.22 in May. C3.ai had listed in December last year when it raised $651 million at a list price of $42 apiece and a valuation of $4 billion. On an opening day, the stock popped to $100 at a valuation of $9.6 billion.