C3.ai Inc.’s shares C3.ai Inc. gained 14% after hours on Thursday following the announcement that the company that specializes with enterprise artificial intelligence and forecasts positive results and also cited “substantially improving” market sentiment.
“As we enter into our fourth quarter, we are seeing tailwinds from improved business optimism and increased interest in applying C3.ai AI, +2.80% solutions to address an increasing range of applications across a broadening set of industries,” Chief Executive Thomas Siebel said on the earnings call of the company in the FactSet transcript. “This is a dramatic change from what we experienced in mid-2022.”
He said “there is a genuine optimism in the marketplace for our solutions, and the overall business sentiment appears to be substantially improving.”
Siebel pointed out that the quarter was a good example of C3.ai’s move to a model of pricing based on consumption and he noted that the response “from partners and prospects has been uniformly enthusiastic.”
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For the fourth quarter of fiscal year C3.ai’s management C3.ai anticipates $70 million to $72 million in revenues. C3.ai’s FactSet consensus was $69.9 million. Executives are also anticipating an estimated $24-$28 million loss adjusted from operations.
The company’s shares have risen by 90% this year, amid a fervent Wall Street interest in artificial intelligence, driven by the rise of the OpenAI ChatGPT chatbot that falls under the category of intelligent AI.
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“The recent explosion of innovation and availability of large language models and in generative pre-trained transformers are also immediately compatible with the C3.ai platform, enabling us to increase the utility of our platform and our applications,” Siebel stated on the earnings call. “We believe the importance of the ongoing developments in generative AI is difficult to overestimate.”
Even though ChatGPT can be described as a chatbot Siebel is also seeing a lot of potential in the field of generative AI as it relates to enterprise-level search.
“The addressable market is huge,” he said during the call to discuss earnings. “Business is solid. Customers are very happy. Our employees are extremely productive, and the future looks bright.”
Siebel announced in the earnings announcement that C3.ai continues to be on track to be “cash positive and non-GAAP profitable” at the end of the fiscal year 2024.
The company reported on Thursday the third quarter of fiscal year with a net loss of $63.2 million (57 cents) per share. This compares to the deficit of $39.5 million which is 38 cents per share in the previous year period. Based on an adjusted basis, C3.ai lost 6 cents per share, while analysts following the company by FactSet were anticipating a 22-cent profit per share.
C3.ai’s revenue fell from $69.8 million to $66.7 Million from $69.8 million, but it was higher than the consensus estimate that was $64.2 million.
The company announced the number of customers it served at 236.
