On Wednesday, C3.ai (NYSE:AI) discussed first-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.

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Summary

C3.ai reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $52.4 million, with a notable subscription revenue of $49.2 million, comprising 94% of total revenue.

The company has undergone significant restructuring, including a 40% reduction in headcount, achieving annualized cost savings of $135 million.

Federal bookings grew by 138% year over year, driven by dissatisfaction with existing incumbents and increased government spending.

C3.ai's product strategy is now focused on its Agentic AI Platform and the C3 Code, which allows rapid enterprise AI application development.

The company posted a positive free cash flow of $2.1 million, a significant improvement from the previous year's negative cash flow.

Management outlined a clear plan for a turnaround, focusing on consistent revenue growth, free cash flow from operations, and non-GAAP profitability.

Future revenue guidance for fiscal year 2027 is set at $210 million to $240 million, with a non-GAAP operating loss guidance of $123 million to $155 million.

Forrester Research ranked C3.ai as the top AI platform in several categories, enhancing its market position.

C3.ai aims to strengthen its forward deployed engineering organization to support customer deployments and offset costs with C3 Code capabilities.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Hi, welcome to the C3.ai fiscal first quarter 2027 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

And now I'd like to hand the call over to today's host, Amit Berry. Please go ahead.

Amit Berry, Investor Relations

Good afternoon and welcome to C3.ai's earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2027, which ended on July 31, 2026. My name is Amit Berry and I lead Investor Relations at C3.ai. With me on the call today are Tom Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Hitesh Lath, Chief Financial Officer. After the market closed today, we issued a press release with details regarding our first quarter results, which can be accessed through the Investor Relations section on our website at ir.c3.ai.

This call is being webcast and a replay will be available on our IR website following the conclusion of the call. During today's call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking under federal securities laws. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be considered representative of our views as of any subsequent date. We disclaim any obligation to update forward-looking statements or outlook.

These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For a further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our filings with the SEC. All figures will be discussed on a non-GAAP basis unless otherwise noted. Also, during today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures.

A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures, to the extent reasonably available, is included in our press release. Finally, at times in our prepared remarks and in response to your questions, we may discuss metrics that are incremental to our usual presentation to give greater insight into the dynamics of our business or our quarterly results. Please be advised that we may or may not continue to provide this additional detail in the future, and with that, let me turn the call over to Tom.

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us. Three months ago, I returned as Chief Executive Officer with a mandate to turn this company around. I returned as CEO because the company was candidly underperforming despite every advantage. The product offerings are exceptional, the market is huge and rapidly growing, and the balance sheet is rock solid. None of that was the problem. The problem was execution. And one quarter into the turnaround, I believe the company is on track.

In the past three months, we have restored fundamental management discipline to this business. We completely restructured the company. We restructured sales, we restructured products, we restructured services. We reset the cost structure, driving massive costs out of the business and implemented rigorous cost controls. We reinstated the fundamental management practices necessary to run a serious business: clear ownership, hard deadlines, weekly reviews.

We rebuilt the selling motion around disciplined account management and pipeline development rather than heroics. We now have experienced executives in charge of every aspect of the business in sales and products and services, in financing, legal. This is the leadership team that will execute the turnaround. We refocused the product offerings on our agentic AI stack, our greatest technical strength and the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the market.

And this quarter showed meaningful progress. Revenue came in above our guidance, bookings grew at 73%, and we took real costs out of the business to narrow our operating loss and generate free cash flow in the quarter. We closed 22 enterprise agreements in the quarter, including with Heidelberg Materials, Johnson and Johnson, Ford Motor Company, C Span Holcim, the Department of War, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the US Department of Agriculture.

Federal business was particularly strong, with federal bookings growing 138% year over year. These results are early evidence that the turnaround is taking hold. The C3 agentic AI platform remains the starting point of every sales engagement. It reflects over 15 years of software development in which we invested in excess of $3 billion. Last month, Forrester Research released a very significant study in which they evaluated the strengths of all the AI platform providers.

And in that evaluation they ranked C3.ai at the top of the stack. Forrester ranked the C3.ai platform number one in data modeling, number one in agent development, number one in application development tools, number one in cohesive experience, number one in governance controls, number one in platform management, number one in security certification, and number one in supporting services and offerings. The other companies evaluated in the study include a who's who in software, Palantir, Google, Databricks, and 11 others.

So this study is a pretty significant benchmark and really a hallmark to the technology achievement of C3.ai in the marketplace over the last 15 years. Our primary offerings today include the C3 Agentic AI Platform, C3 Generative AI, C3.ai Studio, and importantly, C3 Code. The C3.ai Studio is our control plane for developing and operating large-scale enterprise AI applications and C3 Code is your agentic AI application builder that turns a natural language prompt into a working enterprise AI application in minutes to hours.

C3 Code will be at the vanguard of our growth engine going forward. This product is absolutely remarkable and I encourage you to go onto the web, take a look at it, and take it for a try. As an example of the power of C3 Code, you can take an RFP or you can take a 6-inch thick product specification. You can provide it to C3 Code. It assembles the data, it does the data aggregation, it autonomously builds the ontology, it develops the pipeline, it builds the machine learning models, it designs the user interface, and it autonomously delivers a working enterprise AI application without writing one line of manual code.

This is really remarkable and you have to see it to believe it. C3 Code, broader platform adoption, federal systems growth, and sales discipline are at the heart of our growth engine going forward. In closing, let me be clear about where we are going. Our priorities are clear. They are measured. The turnaround is on track. We have a well-designed plan and this is all about execution. Return the company to quarter-over-quarter consistent revenue growth, attain free cash flow from operations, and reach non-GAAP profitability.

Every objective in this company ties to those goals every day, every week, every month. We're not going to ask the market to underwrite a story. Our plan is to deliver results quarter over quarter and let those results speak for themselves. And with that, let me turn the call over to Hitesh Lath to talk about the specific financial results of the quarter.

Hitesh Lath, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Tom. Total revenue for the quarter was $52.4 million. Subscription revenue was $49.2 million, representing 94% of total revenue. Professional services revenue was $3.2 million, of which $1.8 million was revenue from prioritized engineering services, or PEs. Our subscription and PEs revenue combined was $50.9 million and accounted for 97% of total revenue. Non-GAAP gross profit for the quarter was $26.1 million and non-GAAP gross margin improved sequentially from 37% last quarter to 50%, primarily due to cost reduction actions we've taken over the last few months.

Next quarter, as we make selective investments in a forward deployed engineering organization, we expect our non-GAAP gross margin to moderate to mid-40s. Non-GAAP operating loss for the quarter was $36.2 million. This was $8.3 million better than the midpoint of our guidance. Non-GAAP net loss for the quarter improved to $30.7 million, $0.20 per share. Our non-GAAP expenses for the quarter were $88.5 million. This reflects a reduction of almost $40 million as compared to the actual non-GAAP expenses of $128.1 million same quarter last year and a reduction of over $17 million as compared to the last quarter.

Free cash flow for the quarter was positive $2.1 million as compared to negative $34.3 million same quarter last year and negative $54.8 million last quarter. This was due to a significant reduction in our quarterly cash expenses as well as strong collections. We continue to be very well capitalized and closed the quarter with $651.1 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. Now a quick update on our restructuring plan. Our restructuring is almost complete and we have been able to achieve annualized cost savings of approximately $135 million across our business.

This includes cost savings from approximately 40% headcount reduction across all organizations as well as from reduction in non-employee expenses. As we said on the last quarter's earnings call, some of the cost savings will be fully realized starting with the second half of fiscal year 2027. With a substantially improved cost structure, reorganized and focused sales, services, and products organizations, we are well positioned to achieve revenue growth, materially improve our operating efficiency and free cash flow, and position the company for long-term success.

Now I'll move on to our guidance for second quarter and fiscal year 2027. Our revenue guidance for second quarter of fiscal year 27 is $51 million to $55 million. Our guidance for non-GAAP loss from operations for second quarter is $34.5 million to $42.5 million. Our revenue guidance for fiscal year 27 is $210 million to $240 million. Our guidance for non-GAAP loss from operations for fiscal year 27 is $123 million to $155 million. For the remainder of fiscal year 27, we expect our free cash flow to broadly align with our guidance range for non-GAAP loss from operations.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to the operator to begin the Q and A session.

OPERATOR

Certainly. And our first question for today comes from the line of Patrick Mulravens from Citizens. Your question please.

Patrick Mulravens, Analyst at Citizens

Oh great. Thank you. And Tom, congratulations on the beginning of the turnaround here. I mean with federal up 138%, I think I have to start with that, which is what was sort of the biggest thing that you won, how did you win it? And what does the pipeline look like for more things like that in federal.

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

The pipeline. Federal looks very good. And I would say, you know, there's an incumbent there that has a large market share with very high levels of dissatisfaction both with their product and their business practices. So a lot of that dissatisfaction is spinning off now in opportunities for us. So in addition, I mean, you know, the government's spending a lot of money on these types of technologies, particularly in the intelligence and the defense sectors.

I think the defense budget's about to go from a billion to 1.5 billion, like this month or next month. So there's a lot of. I'm sorry, trillion. Okay, 1 trillion to 1.5 trillion. Thank you. So there's a lot of spending there and we're getting a lot of traction.

Patrick Mulravens, Analyst at Citizens

And you mentioned this in your remarks too. So you're going to invest more in a forward deployed engineering organization. What does that mean for C3? And did you have forward deployed engineers before?

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

And if not, what are you doing differently here? We always—well, we've had forward deployed engineers, I think going back to about 2014, I could be wrong by a year or two. So really we've always had that function and we need to be absolutely sure that each and every one of us are satisfied, our customers are achieving what they need to achieve. And so we're going to increase our investment in people to help them with these deployments. And I think that investment in people is going to be offset in the medium run by this C3 Code product that you just have to see where it's doing all of these data aggregation, pipeline building, machine learning development, user interface without any programmers. It is way cool. So that's going to mitigate the need for forward deployed engineers in the medium and long run. But in the short run, near term, we're going to over-invest in existing customers to assure they continue to realize the returns they're looking for. All right, great.

Patrick Mulravens, Analyst at Citizens

Thank you. We did see it, by the way. We came in and did a demo and it was remarkable. That was six months ago, so I'm sure it's evolved a lot since then, but it was really.

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

OPERATOR

Thank you, sir. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Reddy Sultan from UBS. Your question please.

Reddy Sultan, Analyst at UBS

Awesome. Yeah, I guess maybe just to follow up on the Fed opportunity. I'm curious how much of that opportunity is in sort of displacing incumbents like you mentioned versus sort of greenfield work. And then what gives you confidence that you can displace that incumbent or those incumbents successfully?

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, we've been doing it, you know, for a while and I think it accelerated last quarter. And there's—I think they're a fine company, they make a good product, but you know, there's people who want to replace them. And that creates an opportunity for us, I'd say. And then there's, you know, lots of greenfield opportunity where we, you know, compete with them and win. So federal just has been and remains a really good business sector for us.

Reddy Sultan, Analyst at UBS

Got it. Just one quick follow up. If we think about the high end of the full year guide, it does imply a pretty steep acceleration if you hit that. And I guess like my question is fundamentally like what needs to happen? What needs to go right for you to hit that high end of the guide? And I guess like what gives you, you know, I guess like what gives you confidence that could happen?

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

You know, I'll be honest with you, I'm less interested in hitting the high end of that guide than I am making sure that we built the pipeline and we have the sales organization in place to demonstrate consistent quarter over quarter revenue growth, you know, from, you know, Q3 on into perpetuity. And I think that if we're able to demonstrate consistent revenue growth, if we're ever get to the point where we're running free cash flow operations and get the company to non-GAAP profitability, I think it's highly likely this company will not be trading at a revenue multiple of like 3.5.

It'll be trading at a revenue multiple of 10, 15, 20 or 25. And I think that will bode well for our investors.

Reddy Sultan, Analyst at UBS

Thank you.

OPERATOR

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Mike Latimore from Northland Capital Markets. Your question please.

Mike Latimore, Analyst at Northland Capital Markets

Yeah, on the C3 Code, obviously sounds really interesting. Is that a meaningful part of the pipeline or are you still kind of in early stages of marketing that?

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Honestly, Mike, we're in the early stages of marketing that. But hold onto your socks because it doesn't have to be a, you know, multimillion dollar acquisition. And so people would start small and then grow and grow. The initial customers who are using it just love it. And I used it here to replace a pretty substantial piece of enterprise software that we have in place that will remain unnamed. And these guys—we pay a lot of money for this application; it's in the kind of HR management space—and these guys built an application in a day, okay, that replaces an enterprise application here in a day. I mean, it's unbelievable.

Mike Latimore, Analyst at Northland Capital Markets

Yeah, that's great. And I mean, in the past, you've sort of promoted, you know, selling enterprise AI applications. It feels like you're maybe moving more towards a little bit of a platform strategy here. Or is that the wrong interpretation?

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

I think you picked on—I think you nailed it, Mike. And we weren't that explicit about—so in the past, we have sold the AI platform and then we have used the AI platform to build enterprise AI applications, which are kind of big applications that do things like predictive maintenance or demand forecasting or fraud detection or supply chain optimization. So going forward, all these applications have been broken down into their atomic particles, and their atomic particles, if you will, are embedded in the AI platform.

And if you want to build one of these applications for predictive maintenance for aircraft or process optimization in oil refining, whatever it might be, you could basically assemble those atomic particles in real time that become that application. So it's not—they're just there. And there are thousands of those elements that kind of reassemble on demand, either because you asked them to do it or you did it through C3 Code. So what’s going forward is a little bit different.

It's good. Very insightful, what you caught there.

Mike Latimore, Analyst at Northland Capital Markets

Great, thanks. And then just last on customer concentration, any kind of metric you can provide there? Do you have any customer over 5 or over 10% of revenue, or what are your top 10 customers or percentage like that?

Hitesh Lath, Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Mike. Not a meaningful change from before. And we'll disclose that to the extent appropriate in our 10-Q, which will be out in a few days.

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

I don't think there's any one customer.

Mike Latimore, Analyst at Northland Capital Markets

Okay. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.

OPERATOR

Thank you. This does conclude the question and answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to Mr. Siebel for any further remarks.

Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, everybody, for your time. We appreciate it. And keep your eye on the ball. We're very focused here. All of these executives have their eye on the ball, and I think if they continue to execute their plans as they have been, this will bode well for C3 investors. And that's the game we're playing. So thank you for your interest.

OPERATOR

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.