AI Darling Criticized for Product Delays, Founder Tom Siebel's Micromanaging

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The AI hype cycle has birthed innumerable boosters. An unlikely member of this group is Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Siebel.

Since selling his first company to Oracle Corp. in 2006, Siebel started C3.ai Inc., an ostensibly cutting-edge software firm that helps customers crunch and analyze huge amounts of data. The 70-year-old founder has become a regular on the business press circuit and posited that C3's new generative artificial intelligence product will “change the nature of the human-computer interface” and its release could be an “iPhone moment.”

Investors, with a newly insatiable appetite for anything AI, have eaten it up. In the first quarter, the share price tripled for the company whose ticker symbol is literally “AI.”

But C3's products are different than the emerging technologies such as large language models that power OpenAI's popular ChatGPT chatbot. Moreover, its marketing pivot to AI is fairly recent — the company is on its third name since being founded in 2009. It was earlier called C3 Energy, banking on the then-trendy concept of tracking emissions and energy. It later rebranded as C3 IOT to ride the internet-connected machine wave before calling itself C3.ai in 2019.

There are also signs of stress at the company. Interviews with more than 30 former employees and associates describe Siebel as a micromanager who fires people impulsively and must sign off on almost every decision, down to language for contracts and marketing. C3 also has demonstrated unfinished products in presentations as if they're ready for use and had trouble signing new customers.

Some investors are betting against the stock. In April, a short-seller alleged that C3 was chasing trends and had accounting and management problems. The