C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE: AI) stands as a pioneering force in enterprise artificial intelligence software, offering cutting-edge solutions for digital transformation across multiple industries. Trading under the memorable ticker symbol AI on the New York Stock Exchange, the company has captured significant attention from investors seeking exposure to the rapidly expanding AI market. This comprehensive analysis provides both real-time market data and in-depth evaluation to help investors make informed decisions about C3.ai stock, examining the company’s fundamentals, competitive position, financial health, and future prospects in the dynamic enterprise AI landscape.
Key Statistics at a Glance
Understanding C3.ai’s market position requires examining several critical financial metrics. The following sections break down the most important data points that investors should monitor when evaluating AI stock.
Current Price & Valuation
| Metric | Value |
| Current Stock Price | ~$11.50 – $12.50 |
| Market Capitalization | $1.3 – $1.5 Billion |
| P/E Ratio (TTM) | Negative (Company Unprofitable) |
| EPS (TTM) | Negative (Net Loss) |
| 1-Year Target Estimate | $14.12 (Analyst Average) |
Trading & Range Information
| Metric | Value |
| 52-Week Range | $8.00 – $24.00 |
| Average Daily Volume | High Trading Volume |
| Beta (5-Year) | ~1.8 (High Volatility) |
The beta value of approximately 1.8 indicates that C3.ai stock is significantly more volatile than the broader market. This means the stock tends to experience larger price swings both up and down compared to the S&P 500 index, making it a higher-risk, higher-potential-reward investment suitable primarily for risk-tolerant investors.
Key Dates & Financial Health
| Metric | Value |
| Next Earnings Date | February 25-26, 2026 |
| Revenue (TTM) | Growing Year-over-Year |
| Profit Margin | Negative (Net Loss) |
| Cash Position | Strong Balance Sheet |
Understanding C3.ai Stock – The Company Behind the Ticker
Before making any investment decision, it is essential to understand the company behind the stock ticker. C3.ai has evolved from an Internet of Things focused startup to a comprehensive enterprise AI software leader with a compelling founding story and strategic vision.
Company Overview
Founded in 2009 by technology visionary Thomas Siebel, C3.ai was originally established as C3 IoT with a mission to harness the power of big data and machine learning for enterprise applications. Siebel, who previously founded Siebel Systems (sold to Oracle for $5.85 billion), brought decades of enterprise software experience to the venture. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, the company rebranded to C3.ai to reflect its broader focus on artificial intelligence and digital transformation beyond just IoT applications.
C3.ai went public on December 9, 2020, pricing its IPO at $42.00 per share. The stock surged to an all-time high of $183.90 in December 2020, capturing investor enthusiasm for AI-powered solutions during a period of heightened interest in technology stocks. Since then, the stock has experienced significant volatility, reflecting both the opportunities and challenges inherent in the rapidly evolving enterprise AI market.
Leadership & Corporate Structure
In a recent leadership transition, Stephen Ehikian was appointed as Chief Executive Officer, while founder Thomas Siebel continues to serve as Executive Chairman. This leadership structure allows Siebel to maintain strategic oversight while bringing in operational expertise to drive the company’s next phase of growth.
An important consideration for investors is C3.ai’s dual-class share structure. This corporate governance arrangement gives founders and certain insiders enhanced voting rights, allowing them to maintain significant control over company decisions even as they hold a minority of total shares outstanding. While this structure enables long-term strategic thinking without pressure from short-term market fluctuations, it also means that minority shareholders have limited influence on major corporate decisions, including board composition and strategic direction.
C3.ai’s Product Ecosystem & Market Position
C3.ai has developed a comprehensive suite of AI-powered products designed to help enterprises across various industries modernize operations, improve decision-making, and drive digital transformation initiatives. Understanding these offerings is crucial for evaluating the company’s competitive positioning and growth potential.
The Core Platform: C3 AI Suite
The C3 AI Suite serves as the foundational platform enabling organizations to rapidly develop, deploy, and operate enterprise-scale AI applications. This comprehensive platform combines big data integration, advanced analytics, machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities into a unified environment. The platform’s architecture supports predictive analytics, allowing businesses to forecast equipment failures, optimize supply chains, predict customer behavior, and identify operational inefficiencies before they become costly problems.
What distinguishes the C3 AI Suite is its model-driven architecture, which enables faster application development compared to traditional coding approaches. Organizations can leverage pre-built AI models and templates while customizing them to specific business requirements, significantly reducing time-to-value for AI initiatives.
Key Industry Solutions
Building on the core platform, C3.ai offers several specialized application suites targeting specific industry needs:
- C3 Generative AI: Leverages large language models and generative AI technologies to enable natural language interfaces, automated content generation, and intelligent assistants for enterprise use cases.
- C3 Agentic AI: Empowers autonomous AI agents to perform complex tasks, make decisions, and execute workflows with minimal human intervention, particularly valuable for field service operations and automated business processes.
- C3 AI CRM: An AI-powered customer relationship management solution that provides predictive insights on customer behavior, churn risk, upsell opportunities, and personalized engagement strategies.
- C3 AI Health: Specialized healthcare applications addressing patient risk stratification, population health management, and clinical decision support, helping healthcare organizations improve outcomes while reducing costs.
- C3 AI Supply Chain Suite: Optimizes supply chain operations through demand forecasting, inventory optimization, logistics planning, and supply network resilience analysis.
- Government Solutions: Tailored AI applications for public sector organizations, including defense, intelligence, and civilian agencies focused on fraud detection, threat assessment, and operational efficiency.
Strategic Partnerships
C3.ai has established strategic partnerships with several technology giants, which serve as both distribution channels and validation of its platform capabilities:
- Microsoft Azure: A comprehensive partnership enabling C3.ai solutions to run natively on Azure cloud infrastructure, with joint go-to-market initiatives and co-selling arrangements.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): Integration with AWS services allows customers to deploy C3.ai applications on AWS infrastructure, expanding the addressable market.
- Google Cloud: Similar cloud partnership providing deployment flexibility and access to Google Cloud customers.
- Baker Hughes: Joint venture focusing on AI solutions for the energy sector, particularly oil and gas operations optimization.
- Booz Allen Hamilton: Partnership targeting government and defense sector opportunities, leveraging Booz Allen’s deep public sector relationships.
- Vonage: Recent partnership announced to deliver AI-powered field service solutions, combining C3.ai’s agentic AI capabilities with Vonage’s communications platform.
These partnerships are strategically important because they provide credibility, access to enterprise customers, and technical integration that would be difficult for C3.ai to achieve independently. However, they also introduce dependency risks, as these partners compete with their own AI offerings and could potentially reduce support for C3.ai solutions.
C3.ai (AI) Stock Analysis: Bull vs. Bear Case
Every investment involves weighing potential opportunities against risks. For C3.ai stock, the investment thesis is particularly nuanced, with compelling arguments on both sides. Here is a balanced analysis to help investors make informed decisions.
The Bull Case: Reasons to Buy
Investors optimistic about C3.ai point to several compelling factors that could drive significant stock appreciation:
- First-Mover Advantage in Enterprise AI: C3.ai established its enterprise AI platform years before the current AI boom, giving it a head start in developing industry-specific expertise, customer relationships, and proven use cases. This early positioning could translate into market leadership as enterprises accelerate AI adoption.
- Massive Total Addressable Market: The enterprise AI software market is projected to grow from tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. Even capturing a modest market share could result in substantial revenue growth for C3.ai.
- Strong Strategic Partnerships: Relationships with Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, and industry leaders like Baker Hughes provide validation, distribution channels, and co-development opportunities that smaller competitors cannot match.
- Revenue Growth Trajectory: Despite profitability challenges, C3.ai has demonstrated year-over-year revenue growth, indicating customer traction and market demand for its solutions.
- Platform Approach Creates Stickiness: Once enterprises deploy applications on the C3 AI Suite, switching costs are high, potentially leading to long-term customer retention and expansion opportunities as organizations build additional AI applications.
- Recent Innovations in Agentic AI: The company’s focus on agentic AI and field service automation, exemplified by the Vonage partnership, positions it at the forefront of the next wave of AI applications that can autonomously execute complex workflows.
- Favorable Analyst Ratings: Approximately 47% of analysts rate the stock as a buy, with price targets suggesting potential upside from current levels, though estimates vary widely.
- Memorable Ticker Symbol: The ‘AI’ ticker provides free marketing and mindshare advantages as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly mainstream in investment discussions.
The Bear Case: Reasons to Be Cautious
Conversely, skeptical investors highlight several significant risks and challenges that could limit C3.ai’s success:
- Lack of Profitability: C3.ai has consistently reported net losses with negative earnings per share. The company faces the fundamental challenge of achieving profitability while continuing to invest heavily in research, development, and sales. There is no guarantee this inflection point will occur.
- Intense Competition: C3.ai competes against technology giants with vastly greater resources, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and specialized players like Palantir. Many large enterprises are also building AI capabilities in-house rather than purchasing third-party platforms.
- High Stock Volatility: With a beta around 1.8, C3.ai stock experiences dramatic price swings, creating significant downside risk during market corrections. The stock has declined substantially from its all-time high of $183.90, demonstrating its volatility.
- Valuation Concerns: Despite unprofitability, C3.ai maintains a relatively high price-to-sales ratio compared to profitable software companies, suggesting the market has priced in substantial future growth that may not materialize.
- Customer Concentration Risk: A significant portion of revenue comes from a limited number of large customers. Loss of any major account could materially impact financial performance.
- Long Sales Cycles: Enterprise software sales, particularly for complex AI platforms, involve lengthy evaluation periods and proof-of-concept phases, making revenue growth unpredictable and difficult to forecast.
- Dual-Class Share Structure: The governance structure limits minority shareholder influence, potentially enabling management decisions that do not align with public investor interests.
- Partnership Dependencies: While partnerships with cloud providers are beneficial, these same partners increasingly compete with their own AI offerings, creating potential conflicts of interest and reducing their incentive to promote C3.ai solutions.
- Execution Risk: The recent CEO transition, while potentially positive, introduces uncertainty during a critical growth period. Leadership changes can disrupt strategy and organizational momentum.
Recent News & Financial Performance
Staying informed about recent developments is essential for investors tracking C3.ai stock. The following sections summarize the latest earnings results and strategic announcements that could influence the stock’s trajectory.
Latest Earnings & Guidance
C3.ai’s most recent quarterly earnings report reflected the company’s ongoing transition toward sustainable growth. While specific results vary by quarter, the company has generally demonstrated revenue growth paired with continued operating losses as it invests in expanding its product portfolio and sales capabilities.
The upcoming earnings announcement scheduled for February 25-26, 2026, will be closely watched by investors for several key indicators: revenue beat or miss versus analyst estimates, customer acquisition metrics including new logos and expansion within existing accounts, progress toward profitability or path to breakeven, and forward guidance that could reset market expectations.
Management’s commentary on AI market dynamics, competitive positioning, and the effectiveness of recent strategic initiatives will be particularly important given the rapidly evolving landscape and heightened competition in enterprise AI.
Strategic Announcements & Partnerships
Several recent developments have shaped C3.ai’s strategic direction:
- CEO Appointment: The appointment of Stephen Ehikian as CEO marks a significant leadership evolution, with founder Thomas Siebel transitioning to Executive Chairman. This change signals a maturation of the company’s management structure while maintaining strategic continuity.
- Vonage Partnership: The strategic partnership with Vonage to deliver AI-powered field service solutions represents C3.ai’s push into agentic AI applications that can autonomously handle complex, multi-step workflows in industries like utilities, telecommunications, and healthcare.
- Product Innovations: Continued investment in C3 Generative AI capabilities positions the company to compete in the large language model application space, though this also means competing against well-funded startups and technology giants with proprietary foundation models.
Investors should monitor news regarding new customer wins, particularly in strategic verticals, partnership expansions or modifications, and any changes to the company’s pricing or go-to-market strategy as indicators of competitive positioning and growth momentum.
FAQS
What does the ticker ‘AI’ stand for on the NYSE?
The ticker symbol AI represents C3.ai, Inc., an enterprise artificial intelligence software company. While the ticker provides excellent brand recognition in today’s AI-focused market, investors should focus on the company’s fundamentals rather than just the memorable stock symbol.
Is C3.ai (AI) a profitable company?
No, C3.ai is not currently profitable. The company reports negative earnings per share and a negative P/E ratio, reflecting ongoing net losses. This is not uncommon for growth-stage technology companies that prioritize market expansion and product development over near-term profitability. C3.ai invests heavily in research and development, sales and marketing, and strategic initiatives to capture market share in the rapidly growing enterprise AI sector. However, the timeline to profitability remains uncertain, which represents a significant risk factor for investors.
What is the price target for AI stock?
Analyst price targets for C3.ai stock vary considerably, reflecting different views on the company’s prospects. The average one-year price target among analysts is approximately $14.12, with estimates ranging from a low of $8.00 to a high of $24.00. This wide range illustrates the uncertainty and divergent opinions surrounding the stock. Investors should treat price targets as one input among many rather than definitive predictions, as analyst forecasts frequently change based on quarterly results and market conditions.
Who are C3.ai’s main competitors?
C3.ai faces competition from multiple directions. Technology giants including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon offer their own AI platforms and services through Azure AI, Google Cloud AI, and AWS AI respectively. Specialized enterprise software competitors include Palantir Technologies, which offers data analytics and AI solutions particularly strong in government and defense sectors. Salesforce competes in the CRM and customer-facing AI space. Additionally, many large enterprises choose to build AI capabilities in-house using open-source tools rather than purchasing third-party platforms, representing a significant competitive threat. Smaller, well-funded AI startups focusing on specific verticals or use cases also compete for customer attention and budget.
When did C3.ai go public?
C3.ai completed its initial public offering on December 9, 2020, pricing shares at $42.00. The IPO occurred during a period of strong investor appetite for technology and AI-related companies, contributing to the stock’s rapid appreciation in the immediate aftermath of going public.
What was C3.ai’s all-time high stock price?
C3.ai’s all-time high stock price was $183.90, reached in December 2020 shortly after its IPO. The stock has declined significantly from this peak, reflecting market recalibration of valuations for unprofitable growth companies, increased competition in the enterprise AI market, and broader technology sector corrections. The substantial decline from all-time highs serves as a reminder of the stock’s volatility and the risks inherent in investing in high-growth, unprofitable companies.
Does C3.ai pay a dividend?
No, C3.ai does not currently pay a dividend to shareholders. As a growth-oriented company operating at a loss, C3.ai reinvests all available capital back into the business to fund product development, sales expansion, and strategic initiatives. Dividend payments are typically not expected from unprofitable growth companies and are unlikely until C3.ai achieves consistent profitability and generates sustainable free cash flow.
Is C3.ai a good long-term investment?
Whether C3.ai represents a good long-term investment depends entirely on individual investor circumstances, risk tolerance, and investment objectives. As a high-growth technology stock in the enterprise AI sector, C3.ai offers significant potential upside if the company successfully captures meaningful market share, achieves profitability, and executes on its strategic vision. The massive total addressable market for enterprise AI and the company’s first-mover advantages and strategic partnerships support the bullish case. However, the investment also carries substantial risks including ongoing losses, intense competition from well-capitalized rivals, high stock volatility, customer concentration, and execution uncertainties. C3.ai is best suited for risk-tolerant investors with a long-term investment horizon who can withstand significant price volatility and potential capital losses. Conservative investors seeking stable returns or those unable to absorb potential losses should carefully weigh these risks. All investors should conduct thorough due diligence, consider position sizing appropriate to their risk tolerance, and potentially consult with financial advisors before making investment decisions.
The Bottom Line on NYSE: AI
C3.ai (NYSE: AI) represents a high-risk, high-potential-reward investment opportunity in the enterprise artificial intelligence sector. The company has established itself as a credible player in the rapidly expanding AI market, with a comprehensive product portfolio, strategic partnerships with technology leaders, and a first-mover advantage in certain industry verticals. For investors bullish on enterprise AI adoption and willing to accept significant volatility, C3.ai offers exposure to a potentially transformative technology trend.
However, the investment case is far from straightforward. Persistent unprofitability, intense competition from both technology giants and specialized startups, high stock volatility, and execution risks cannot be ignored. The company must demonstrate a credible path to sustainable profitability while continuing to invest in innovation and compete against better-resourced rivals. The upcoming earnings report on February 25-26, 2026, will provide important insights into the company’s progress on these fronts.
Prospective investors should approach C3.ai with realistic expectations, understanding that this is a speculative investment suitable primarily for those who can afford potential losses. The stock’s beta of approximately 1.8 signals that significant price swings are to be expected in both directions. Position sizing should be conservative relative to overall portfolio allocation, and investors should be prepared to hold through considerable volatility.
Do Your Own Due Diligence: This analysis provides a framework for understanding C3.ai stock, but it should not be considered personalized investment advice. Every investor has unique financial circumstances, goals, and risk tolerance. Before investing in C3.ai or any security, conduct comprehensive research, review the company’s SEC filings including annual and quarterly reports, monitor earnings calls and guidance, evaluate your own risk capacity, and consider consulting with qualified financial professionals. The enterprise AI market is evolving rapidly, and information can become outdated quickly, making continuous monitoring essential for informed investment decisions.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. Stock prices, financial metrics, and market conditions change constantly. All investment decisions should be made after thorough research and, when appropriate, consultation with qualified financial advisors. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investors should carefully consider their own financial situation and risk tolerance before making any investment decisions.
Last Updated: February 2026
Adrian Cole is a technology researcher and AI content specialist with more than seven years of experience studying automation, machine learning models, and digital innovation. He has worked with multiple tech startups as a consultant, helping them adopt smarter tools and build data-driven systems. Adrian writes simple, clear, and practical explanations of complex tech topics so readers can easily understand the future of AI.
