Tom Siebel, CEO of C3.ai, discusses failure and the future after his company’s soaring IPO
Nine out of 10 companies fail when implementing artificial intelligence software, says Tom Siebel, the billionaire founder and chief executive of C3.ai. And in that failure Siebel has found opportunity.
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“Virtually every one of our customers failed one, two, or three times” trying to build their own A.I. systems, Siebel told Fortune hours after the IPO. He says this is the same pattern he had seen earlier in his career, first selling database software in the 1980s at Oracle, and later building Siebel Systems, the sales-force automation and customer relationship software company he sold to Oracle for $5.85 billion in 2005. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes,” he says. “These companies try a few times. They fire the CIO, and then they get serious and get the job done.”
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He urges the incoming Biden administration to commit more resources to using A.I. in military and intelligence applications, particularly in light of China’s multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in these technologies. “Make no mistake, we’re at war with China in artificial intelligence,” he says.
C3.ai has major contracts with the U.S. Air Force, for which it has built a system that predicts when aircraft parts will need to be replaced, helping the force keep more of its planes ready to fly, as well as with Raytheon, a major defense contractor.
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In general, Siebel says, A.I. ethics is too important to delegate to an A.I. ethics officer or an A.I. ethics department. “That’s just a cop-out,” he says. “The CEO needs to own this, the whole management team needs to own this, and the board.”
See the full story here: https://fortune.com/2020/12/09/c3-ai-ipo-shares-stock-tom-siebel-ceo/
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