C3 AI’s C3 Code first installment of turnaround plan

C3 AI said C3 Code is generally available as part of its Spring 2026 release. The product launch is the first since C3 AI announced a broad restructuring that eliminated 26% of its workforce and refocused on its core markets.

The company said C3 Code can autonomously build production enterprise AI applications quickly via natural language. Its autonomous agents can design, configure, test and deploy applications.

For Stephen Ehikian, CEO of C3 AI, the availability of C3 Code is a small step toward putting the business on the right path. In a press release, C3 AI used Anthropic Claude to compare C3 Code to Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Palantir AI FDE. The comparison is cute, but C3 AI needs to build more business momentum.

C3 Code has more than 40 industry ontologies including pre-built data models for manufacturing, energy, financial services, defense, utilities and healthcare. C3 Code features a unified abstraction layer, prebuilt machine learning models, AI agent orchestration, governance and an agnostic approach to LLMs.

Use cases for C3 Code include:

• Supply chain intelligence.
• Global parts visibility.
• Asset performance optimization.

“Executives evaluating Enterprise AI platforms face a core question: can their platform of choice reduce the time, cost, and risk of getting production AI into the hands of business users? C3 Code answers that question directly,” said Nikhil Krishnan, CTO, Data Science, C3 AI.

Early in C3 AI's turnaround

C3 AI in February reported a third quarter net loss of $133.19 million, or 94 cents a share on revenue of $53.3 million, down from $98.78 million a year ago. The company also said it would restructure and eliminate 26% of its workforce to save about $135 million.

For the fourth quarter, C3 AI projected revenue of $48 million to $52 million and fiscal 2026 revenue of $246.7 million to $250.7 million. The third quarter results and outlook fell well short of Wall Street estimates.

Ehikian said the company was focusing on its core customers and industries, creating best-in-class applications and focusing its sales efforts on large enterprise transformations.

C3 AI names new CEO, cuts outlook

"We are focusing on those product areas where we have clear market leadership, a demonstrated track record of success and where we deliver fast economic value to our customers. These include AI and automation across a business value chain, asset performance, supply chain optimization and procurement for industries such as energy, manufacturing, health care and public sector including defense, intelligence and government services," said Ehikian.

The plan for C3 AI is to solve high-value problems and demonstrate value through accelerated proofs of concept that can quickly move to production.

C3 AI's challenge is that Palantir is playing in the same markets and has built out its ecosystem with multiple partnerships with system integrators.

Ehikian said C3 AI has revamped how it develops products with AI and accelerated R&D. "We are investing in the platform to dramatically reduce the time from idea to deployments, enabling both our teams and our customers to build AI-driven systems more effectively," he said. "Ultimately, this allows the focus to ship from writing code to orchestrating, validating and scaling AI-driven systems to increase velocity immediately we have increased focus on a smaller number of high priority items while enforcing tighter ownership and higher execution standards. This restructuring is a strategic reset that we believe will make the company stronger, more focused and allow us to win long-term."

In March, Ehikian reiterated that C3 AI would double down on product focus in manufacturing, oil and gas, energy and public sector. "Anything outside of that is not a core focus anymore. So that is how we're going to -- from a product perspective and a go-to-market perspective, the other thing is playing bigger," said Ehikian, who said C3 AI has all the components to build enterprise AI applications. The company just has to move faster.

C3 Code is the start of that move.