AX100 interview: How The Joint maps the customer journey as it scales

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Charles Nelles, CTO at The Joint Chiropractic, has to deliver a customer experience that encompasses multiple moving parts, segments and stakeholders including patients, franchisees and doctors. In some ways, Nelles is building systems to herd cats.

I was interested in the business model of The Joint since it rhymed with businesses such as U.S. Physical Therapy and VCA Antech, which is now owned by Mars. The general idea is that a parent company can roll up independent practitioners and physicians and provide technology platforms and efficiencies. Many physicians want to focus on giving care instead of the grunt work involved with running a business.

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The catch is that it's hard to provide a consistent customer and employee experience in those models. And The Joint is scaling rapidly. In 2023, The Joint performed 13.6 million adjustments, treated 1.7 million unique patients, and added 923,000 new patients. For 2023, the company reported a net loss of $9.8 million on revenue of $117.7 million.

I caught up with Nelles in an interview at Constellation Research's Ambient Experience in Austin. Here's a recap of our chat.

The business. Nelles said that 75% of The Joint's clinics are not owned by doctors and the majority of them aren't owned by the company. "We focus on people that are looking for regular adjustments to just improve and maintain quality of life range of motion, health and wellness," said Nelles.

The Joint has a business model that's built on efficiency and throughput. The typical patient is not taking a lot of time out of the day for an adjustment but stopping in during errands.

During The Joint's fourth quarter earnings conference call, CEO Peter Holt said the company is refranchising corporate owned clinics. He added that monthly memberships in 2023 contributed 85% of system-wide sales, up from 84% a year ago. "As we move into 2024, we've renewed our mission to improve quality of life through routine and affordable chiropractic care, and we’ve advanced our vision to be the champion of chiropractic," said Holt.

Providing a trio of experiences. Nelles noted that The Joint is managing the experience of three different players. The patient needs the ultimate experience, but there's the franchisee as well as the doctors, who get more of an employee experience. "The other adventure for me is a lot of franchise owners are either successful franchisees that compare our tech to every other tech and every other franchise across the globe. Or they are successful business people that need another passive source of income," said Nelles.

Who owns the customer journey? The Joint controls the journey for new patients with intake and ongoing relationships. Doctors control more of the experience for existing patients. "We have a wellness coordinator who's up front patient intake new patients coming in existing patients coming through, we have the doctor who is at the core of that experience. And then we also have the franchised seed, who is running that clinic," said Nelles.

On the company level, Holt said The Joint is focusing on the top of the funnel to bring new customers to the company.

"We focused on initiatives to drive new patients including increasing our media efficiency by adjusting our channel mix and increasing our working media spend to reach even more prospective patients. This adjusted media mix pairs with our patient strategy to ensure that we're delivering the message of affordable, convenient chiropractic care to those most likely consumers.

Additionally, we plan new promotions and offers aimed directly at adding new patients. To take advantage of our local differences, we're creating more robust local store marketing programs by providing proven tactics and more nuanced tools for our system."

Nelles said The Joint just completed customer journey mapping and going through the experiences for people that new to chiropractic care and ones that are familiar. "With the journey mapped we can start talking about the outcome we want and the brand experience we're expecting," said Nelles.

The Joint will also enable initial patient bookings, reengage lapsed customers and automate messages to keep in touch.

The tech stack. The Joint has to deal with electronic health records, compliance as well as a series of business systems supporting franchises.

"You want consistency across all the sites. With The Joint you can go into any site in any state and get adjusted. It needs to be a familiar chiropractic experience. A lot of that comes through those systems and delivering content for training, measuring performance against company standards, and answering questions," said Nelles.

Nelles said The Joint decided to buy a base CRM system, SugarCRM, and then build customizations. "When we started this, we were doing something no one else was doing," said Nelles. "It was challenging but we had to build from scratch. We bought something we're not going to have to maintain and put our secret sauce on top of it," said Nelles. "We added on top of the CRM and built two portions--the back office where we're managing patient visits and the front office for managing the user experience."

Change management. Nelles said he has spent time with the contact center to handle the three flavors of callers--customers, doctors and franchisees. "It is very challenging to mix all of those together," said Nelles.

Generative AI. Nelles said the power of generative AI will be to use the right customer data to personalize experiences. The data will inform you what content needs to be delivered and in what channel. "I think we're headed toward handing over the experience eventually to customers and that's what we're looking for with a lot of different audiences," said Nelles. "How do I get the right information about them, deliver the right content and right channel so customers are getting whatever value they need out of the experience."

Employee and customer experiences. For The Joint, employee and customer experiences are intertwined. "You rarely have one without the other," said Nelles. "We are looking to remove complexity."

Most valuable metrics. Nelles said the number one metric is attrition. "We focus on conversion and attrition," said Nelles. "Did we keep you and are you happy? Or did you leave. Some people will come in and join driven by pain and when that goes away they leave."

The goal of the tech stack is to bring customers value and support the lifecycle with processes that are quick, easy and frictionless.

For Holt, The Joint’s most critical metrics are patient counts, conversions, and attrition.

Nelles said: "A lot of what we're working on is communicating with you in the middle. We've nailed how you talk about pain and what can do for you, but once you're in the middle and feeling good we need to educate better and maintain relationships longer. It's a mix of education, coaching and maintaining that doctor patient relationship."

Lessons learned from four Zoho customers

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Zoho customers Sparex, Luxer One, ITV Studios and Bergen Logistics are deriving returns from using multiple applications, a common data model and embedded insights.

At Zoho Day 2024, Constellation Research analysts caught up with Zoho customers to talk about implementations, business challenges and future plans. Here's a look at the interviews, what we learned and how companies are thinking about leveraging artificial intelligence.

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Kris James, Business Intelligence Manager at Sparex

Sparex, a Zoho Analytics customer, is a tractor and agricultural parts manufacturer and distributor with $100 million in sales. Sparex has been using Zoho Analytics for 6 years to aggregate data from 18 different subsidiaries and ERP systems around the globe.

James explained the setup:

"We have 18 different subsidiaries around the globe, and they all have different ERP systems. We merge them into one through our SQL Server Management Studio and reduce the formatting issues and discrepancies between the systems. Once we've cleaned that up, we ingest it in a half hour with the Zoho data bridge tool. It's about 10 million rows in about half an hour daily. We distribute that amongst 200 users on Zoho."

Zoho usage scaled by department, said James. Sales reps started first as Sparex scaled Zoho by bringing on subsidiaries. Managing directors took to Zoho Analytics next followed by head office departments. Today, product management, purchasing, supply planning and finance are pulling some form of reporting data from Zoho Analytics. Of the 200 Zoho Analytics user, about 140 are sales reps.

James' approach to dashboarding is to tailor to business purpose and sometimes a simple pivot table is fine.

"You can host widgets, dashboards and charts all in one go, but we also send automated emails. We have one report that identifies which products are coming towards the end of life. We flag those in our system and send that out to all the product managers and the purchasing teams."

Zoho Analytics was chosen by Sparex after comparing it to Microsoft PowerBI, Tableau and Qlik, said James. Zoho Analytics was the pick since Sparex wasn't leveraging all of the data in the platform and the embedded analytics approach made sense. Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen wrote a report noting that in many cases the embedded analytics of your existing applications should be considered before adding another tool.

"The scope of how we could improve still was so much further within Zoho. Zoho pricing was more competitive and much more friendly the features and support. The support is fantastic," said James.

Going forward, James said Sparex is looking at the AI tools built into Zoho, namely Zia Insights and data preparation features, and already using them to some degree. "Ask Zia is so helpful for our users so they don't have to wait to email me and ask a question," said James. "They can type in a question and get an answer."

James added that Sparex wants to use Zoho globally but needs more language support. Zoho Analytics works in English, Spanish and French, but Sparex has more locations around the world.   

Matt Kuczka, Lead Application Analyst at Luxer One

Luxer One launched as a locker service for dry cleaning in 2005, developed a software platform to manage lockers in 2012, and steadily built out a network of lockers to accept deliveries--even for perishable goods. En route to more than 200 million packages received, Luxer One has been installed in apartment buildings, retailers, universities, offices and libraries.

In an interview with Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller, Kuczka said Luxer One started in San Francisco and Sacramento with a simple concept: "People would drop off their stuff, pick it up two days later and that's how the company started," he said. "From there, it grew quickly into having lockers in apartment buildings, condos, multifamily and retail. People can pick up their packages anytime."

Luxer One built an internal system to manage deliveries, but has used Zoho for CRM, service desk and capturing data for Zoho Analytics. "We knew initially what we wanted to measure: How many packages, what sizes and time of day," explained Kuczka. "Once we started adding in additional data from our CRM and Desk, we saw a lot of tickets where a certain locker system had the same issues over and over."

"Our use grew naturally over time, and we got more insights and better reports," said Kuczka. "We create a dashboard for the things that a customer may want to see. We cater to each customer."

Luxer One has been able to collect data for Zoho Analytics in part because it is on the same platform as other applications. Going forward, Kuczka said Luxer One sees potential for AI and automating data chores like standardizing and cleansing.

He said:

"We're realizing we need to automate more to do take those jobs that are mundane that people do over and over again and try to automate them and build them. And this sink of data allows us to do that."

Kuczka said his company creates a data flywheel the more it scales its lockers. The data flows into the service desk, tickets, and customer interactions. Luxer One is experimenting with large language models with its chat bot and classifying question categories. "We're at a very early stage and we've tested a little bit. We're able to automate some tasks like reset codes for lockers," said Kuczka.

Rob O'Brien, ITV Studios, Head of International Technology, at ITV

ITV is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network that has a studios division and broadcasting and streaming arm. ITV Studios creates and distributes TV content and operates in 13 countries. O'Brien said ITV Studios need to track data beyond spreadsheets and looked to Zoho Analytics.

ITV has evolved over the years via consolidation of regional networks that are needed to streamline operations and functions. "We needed a system to bring data together, so we weren't pitching the same idea and increase costs. We needed some kind of audit trail," explained O'Brien. 

Previously, ITV Studios would track 40 to 100 productions by email, and Google Sheets. This approach became really difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic. "We needed a better place to put all of our data into a single place so our leadership could understand where our shows are being made, budgets, crew and locations," said O'Brien.

"We also wanted to add things like risk values, mitigating facts and markup comments so we can adjust plans."

The business side of ITV saw the argument for analytics quickly and was clear about requirements and what it wanted to achieve. "Given COVID, we had to get a system up running quickly," said O'Brien. "That led to a low-code toolset. We had an MVP product in about six weeks. There was change management afterwards, but we knew the requirements and didn't need to get complex."

O'Brien said it used an agile approach to move quickly. Change management was needed to ensure that employees filled in data fields and forms with production data for the risk and legal teams to make decisions. ITV leveraged Zoho Creator and additional products on the platform. Today, ITV is working through various Zoho features on the platform. "This journey over the last five years we've learned about the power of low code, what you can do with it, and integrations into tools like analytics to create dashboards," said O'Brien. 

Keith Cooper, Vice President of Customer Experience at Bergen Logistics

Bergen Logistics is a third-party logistics company primarily serving eye, fashion and lifestyle brands globally.

Cooper said Bergen Logistics was struggling to track leads that were coming in and went to market for a CRM system. Ultimately, Cooper went with Zoho CRM and later used Zoho Desk for client requests and service tracking before adopting Zoho Analytics.

"With the growing number of applications Zoho had available we went with a Zoho One license," said Cooper. "We've been on Zoho One for two years and we have 250 users in our organization."

A deciding factor for Zoho CRM was whether Bergen Logistics would need consultants to implement it. "We knew what the processes should be but weren't sure how we would do the implementation. Once we opened up the hood and dug around, we saw it was fairly straightforward," said Cooper. He said the company used outside help for a few processes, but it was mostly a DIY project to implement Zoho.

Bergen Logistics' stack includes a proprietary warehouse management system that feeds data into the Zoho application stack. "We more than tripled our annual sales production, improved our time to respond and resolve by a hundredfold," said Cooper, who said Zoho is being rolled out globally.

With the implementation, Cooper said Bergen Logistics has honed its KPI game. With Zoho applications, Bergen Logistics has homed in on response time by individual service agent and whether a case was resolved.

Being on one platform also makes it easier to get a dashboard to see where customer issues stand. "One of the biggest benefits of having a cloud-based platform is that anybody in the organization at any time can find what's going on with a particular account or a particular issue," said Cooper. "We have full visibility and can build dashboards for real-time performance in any operational area."

"We've been much better at forecasting. We know what our customer acquisition costs and manage our lifetime value of a customer," said Cooper. "Bergen Logistics is not the lowest cost provider in our space so we have to make sure we're helping customers know the value proposition and manage the sales process."

Going forward, Bergen Logistics is looking to add Zoho applications for account-based marketing as well as embedded artificial intelligence for further insights.

Broadcom posts solid Q1, reiterates outlook

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Broadcom's first quarter results were better-than-expected as technology buyers plan to closely watch comments about retaining VMware customers. Broadcom's chip business continues to benefit from the AI buildout.

The company reported first quarter earnings of $1.32 billion, or $2.84 a share, on revenue of $11.96 billion, up 34% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the first quarter were $10.99 a share. Revenue growth excluding VMware was 11% in the first quarter.

Wall Street was expecting Broadcom to report first quarter earnings of $10.42 a share on revenue of $11.72 billion.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said the acquisition of VMware is "accelerating revenue growth in our infrastructure software segment, as customers deploy VMware Cloud Foundation." He also noted that networking demand was strong as data centers retool for AI.

While Tan talked up VMware, signals in the field are less than positive.

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Broadcom reiterated its fiscal 2024 guidance of revenue of $50 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $30 billion.

In the first quarter semiconductor revenue was 62% of revenue with infrastructure software (CA and VMware primarily) was 38%.

Tan said VMware will grow at a double-digit percentage rate sequentially. "This is simply a result of our strategy with VMware," said Tan. "We are focused on upselling customers, particularly those who are already running their compute workloads on vSphere virtualization tools, to upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation otherwise branded as VCF."

"VCF is the complete software stack, integrating compute, storage and networking that virtualizes and modernizes our customers data centers. This on-prem self-service cloud platform provides our customers with a competent and an alternative to public cloud."

In other words, Tan's bet is that if VMware upsells you will come. Tan also said that AI workloads will be more on-premises for cost savings and that means VCF.  

Tan was asked about VMware upselling with a bit of skepticism. Tan said:

"We're very focused on selling upselling and helping customers to not just buy but deploy this private cloud, but what we call virtual private cloud solution or platform on their on-prem data centers. It has been very successful so far, and I agree that it's early evenings at this point. We've been very prepared to launch this push on private cloud."

Tan was also asked about VMware's annual revenue run rate and Tan agreed that the company is still at a $11 billion to $12 billion pace. Analysts were focused on VMware questions even after starting with AI questions. 

Tan said Broadcom is focusing on go-to-market and engineering VCF so it is more easily deployed. He added that the focus is on about 1,000 strategic customers that will be on-premises and leveraging hybrid deployments. "Most of these customers do not have an on-prem data center that resembles what's in the cloud, which is very high availability. very low latency, and highly resilient," said Tan. "What we are offering with VCF replicates what you get in the public cloud and we are seeing it in the level of bookings."

MongoDB Q1, fiscal year outlook light, but eyes stable workload gains

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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MongoDB's outlook for the first quarter and fiscal year was lighter than expected even as its fourth quarter results were strong.

First, the good news. MongoDB reported a fourth quarter net loss of $55.5 million, or 77 cents a share, on revenue of $458 million, up 27% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the fourth quarter were 86 cents a share. MongoDB was expected to report fourth quarter earnings of 48 cents a share on revenue of $435.55 million.

As for the outlook, MongoDB projected first quarter revenue of $436 million to $440 million with non-GAAP earnings of 34 cents a share to 39 cents a share. Wall Street was looking for revenue of $449.08 million with non-GAAP earnings of 61 cents a share.

• MongoDB steps up generative AI rollout across platform

• MongoDB launches Atlas Vector Search, Atlas Stream Processing to enable AI, LLM workloads

For fiscal 2025, MongoDB projected revenue of $1.9 billion to $1.93 billion, or $2.27 a share to $2.49 a share. Wall Street was expecting annual sales of $2.03 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $3.22 a share.

MongoDB's outlook landed a few days after Snowflake took a hit on its outlook and CEO change.

In a statement, MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria said the company "we will continue to invest in our key product development and go-to-market initiatives." The company ended its fourth quarter with more than 47,800 customers and 2,052 customers paying more than $100,000.

“MongoDB’s results reflect the belt tightening and slower growth we’re see across the mainstream IT market outside of the white-hot pockets tied to AI,” said Doug Henschen, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Nonetheless, MongoDB turned in another quarter of steady, double-digit growth and has plenty of relational migration and net new customer win opportunities to continue on its current healthy growth path.”

For fiscal 2024, MongoDB reported a net loss of $176.6 million, or $2.48 a share, on revenue of $1.68 billion, up 31% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $3.33 a share.

On a conference call with analysts, Ittycheria said he saw solid and stable growth for consumption. 

"Overall we are pleased with our performance in the fourth quarter. We had a healthy quarter of your business led by continued strength and new workload acquisition within our existing Atlas customers. I see stable consumption growth going into next year. Consumption trends have been steady for several quarters now."

However, Ittycheria noted that it's early in the AI application buildout and enterprises need to move beyond pilots to ramp consumption at scale.

He laid out the progression. 

"I strongly believe that AI will be a significant driver of long term growth for MongoDB. We are in the early days of AI akin to the dial-up days of the Internet era. To put things in context, it's important to understand that there are three layers to the AI stack. The first layer is the underlying compute and LLM. The second layer is the fine tuning of models and building of AI applications. And the third layer is deploying and running applications that end users interact with. MongoDB strategies to operate as a second and third layers."

Today, the vast majority of AI spend is happening the first layer that is investment in compute to train and run LLM neither are areas in which we compete. Our enterprise customers today are still largely in the experimentation and prototyping stages of building their initial AI applications.

We expect that will take time for enterprises to deploy production workloads at scale. 

Platforms like MongoDB will benefit as customers build AI applications to drive meaningful operating efficiencies, create compelling customer experiences, and pursue new growth opportunities."

The short version is that MongoDB expects the fiscal 2025 consumption and adoption trends to be similar to fiscal 2024. Ittycheria said MongoDB will focus on workload acquisition, building out its go-to-market operations and hone its migration game from relational databases. "This year we are investing in a number of pilots leveraging AI for relational migrations paired with services to substantially simplify and scale the process," he said. 
 

C3 AI highlights C3 AI Vision, roadmap ahead

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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20240306 C3 Transform 2024 Day One Wrap Up from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

C3 AI outlined its product roadmap for the rest of the year and C3 AI Vision, which will provide spatial representations via data points. C3 AI Vision will cover a bevy of use cases for logistics, sourcing optimization, military, law enforcement, process optimization and aircraft readiness.

Tom Siebel, CEO of C3 AI, outlined C3 AI Vision at Transform 2024 holding an Apple Vision Pro. He had Apple's headset to highlight how spatial computing could ultimately be the user interface for C3 AI Vision. Siebel also said that enterprise software applications needed new interfaces as he compared his old Siebel Systems interfaces with Salesforce, Oracle and SAP to show how little things have changed.

Siebel said C3 AI Vision aims to take a step ahead with enterprise interfaces and vision will be critical for industries like logistics and manufacturing.

"C3 AI Vision can integrate data from any set of data," said Siebel. "The kind of data we need to ingest is drone images, telemetry, and AI models. This requires a new way of thinking. Our world is awash in data and to harness its true potential we must analyze it from every angle and experience AI decision support in a new immersive user experience."

Related: How Baker Hughes used AI, LLMs for ESG materiality assessments | C3 AI launches domain-specific generative AI models, targets industries | C3 AI CEO Tom Siebel: Generative AI enterprise search will have wide impact

Siebel said C3 AI Vision can be used to create digital twins on the fly so enterprises can visualize situations. Apple Vision Pro is in its first iteration and will improve over time and offer enterprises new ways to work with generative AI, AI and data. C3 AI Vision's interface will evolve over time, said Siebel.

C3 AI Vision will be embedded across the platform and applications focused on industries and use cases. 

C3 AI Vision demos were being held at Transform with preview sign-ups available.

Transform, held in Boca Raton, FL, will feature talks from customers such as Holcim, Con Edison, GSK, and US Air Force along with product roadmap discussions.

C3 AI's news at Transform follows a strong fiscal third quarter earnings report that highlighted accelerating revenue growth. The company reported a net loss of 60 cents a share and an adjusted loss of 13 cents a share on revenue of $78.4 million, up 18% from a year ago.

The company said that it closed 50 agreements in the third quarter including 29 new pilots. C3 AI said that its qualified pipeline was up 73% from a year ago. As for the outlook, C3 AI said fourth quarter revenue will be $82 million to $86 million. For fiscal 2024, C3 AI projected revenue of $306 million to $310 million.

The roadmap

Edward Abbo, CTO of C3 AI, walked through demos of what's in the C3 AI platform today and what's to come. Since launching C3 AI Generative AI last year at Transform, the company has deployed 47 customer use cases across multiple industries. US Air Force, Baker Hughes, Boston Scientific and Con Edison are reference customers.

"There's really a wide range of cases. Some of these sit on top of AI applications. Many of these are standalone, and so generative AI can really transform that human computer interaction helping you get insights faster, more effectively," said Abbo.

The architecture for C3 AI is to keep large language models distinct from the data. In a demo, Abbo walked through what's in the platform today.

As for the roadmap, Abbo said C3 AI's summer release will focus on retrieval augmented generation improvements. In the fall, C3 AI will focus on developer support.

The Winter release will revolve around converting intelligence into actions. "We want to focus on enabling actions not just following a workflow, but actually teaching the system how to do specific, complex tasks," said Abbo.

Business value focus

Adrian Rami, Group Vice President, Products & Engineering at C3 AI, said business use cases across industries can drive billions of dollars for oil and gas, manufacturing, healthcare and financial services.

Rami said enterprises need to pick the right use cases with high value, feasibility and repeatability while avoid custom builds. Enterprises need to scale across use cases with one AI, analytics and machine learning foundation. "We recognize what our platform needs to deliver for high value use cases with a common foundational data model," said Rami.

During a keynote, Rami said an enterprise AI application needs a series of tools and features. He also walked through C3 AI's suites for various functions and industries such as supply chain, reliability, sustainability, state and local government, defense and intelligence.

Jim Apostolides, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Operational Excellence at Baker Hughes, outlined how the company scaled C3 AI's platform. Apostolides now has more than 50% of inventory optimization accepted automatically without human intervention at the end of 2023. In 2021, that figure was 3%.

Baker Hughes also used C3 AI for sourcing optimization to improve purchase orders and other processes. Apostolides said Baker Hughes has focused on picking the right use cases and collaborating with C3 AI to drive value. Baker Hughes recently completed an upgrade to the latest C3 AI platform. 

Generative AI embedded throughout platform

Rami said generative AI has the potential to transform the user interface of the C3 AI platform and put data into common business terms. "This will fundamentally change the human-computer interface, and everyone can participate at scale," said Rami.

Jake Whitcomb, Senior Director, Products at C3 AI, walked through advances to make it easier to configure and deploy generative AI. C3 AI will launch a copilot across the platform that will work on multiple products.

The company has drilled down on interfaces with the aim of bringing insights forward quickly without a lot of configurations. C3 AI has launched a quick start feature to onboard data, train models, and configure the interface via C3 AI Studio.

Some screenshots from Whitcomb’s presentation.