C3.ai, the software company founded by software industry legend Tom Siebel, which on Friday filed to go public[1], describes its purpose in life as applying artificial intelligence to sales and marketing. What it is actually doing appears to be much more fixing the sins of infrastructure software such as Hadoop, and its commercial implementations by Cloudera and others.
ZDNet examined what C3.ai calls its "secret sauce," the artificial intelligence suite that it says speeds development of CRM.
It turns out, the secret sauce is really more about platform-as-a-service, rather than AI per se, which is funny, given that machine learning, a form of AI, is mentioned fifty-five times in the C3 prospectus, while platform is mentioned only once, in the company's self-description: "We believe the C3 AI Suite is the only end-to-end Platform-as-a-Service allowing customers to design, develop, provision, and operate Enterprise AI applications at scale."
What C3.ai has invented is a set of building blocks for putting together a system to analyze data coming from a variety of signals, including traditional databases, but also Internet signals such as social media, and, perhaps most important, sensors, including the kinds of sensors industrial companies might build into equipment in the field that they want to monitor.
The building blocks C3.ai makes are tools that developers can access programmatically, and consume on a subscription basis, with some additional metered use.
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