C3 AI CEO on Growing Cybersecurity Threats

from California. Hey, Tom, Good to have you back with us. How are you hi. Great, nice to hear from you. Well, it's nice to have you here and hear your voice. Um, I gotta ask you. I want to get into a lot of things about what your company is doing. Talk to you about AI. But I gotta ask you about this headline that just crossed about hackers saying, um that they exposed Tesla and some jails in a breach of a hundred and fifty thousand security cameras. They said they

wanted to show prevalence of surveillance. We are definitely living in different times. I think the threat associated with US cyber threat okay from bad actors in nation states including Russia, China, North Korea, Iran is existential. I mean, these people have the ability to shut down the United States great power, great infrastructure, the financial system, the healthcare system, you know, with a cell from from the other side of the planet,

and they can do it tomorrow. This has been very very well documented in books that have been recently published, such as The Perfect Weapon and this is how they

tell me the world ends. Uh, And this is very various here stuff that last week the National Security Commission for Artificial Intelligence published its report for years in the making, then concludes that today the United States government is not organized or investing to when the technology come competition against the committed competitor, nourish it prepared to defend against AI enabled threats and rapidly adopt AI applications for national security purposes.

That we are exposed. So there are bad actors out there, and this is very scary. Well, you know, it just reminds me of It's like I've seen this movie before. We saw it in the form of the health pandemic. Lots of warnings for years, and yet we weren't prepared, and I feel like we're setting setting up for something like that again. And I have to say, I'm reading this story and they say, um, they breached massive trove of security camera data collected by a Silicon Valley startup, Ricata.

They gained access to live feeds of a hundred and fifty security cameras inside hospitals, companies, police departments, prisons, and schools, able to view video from inside women's health clinics, psychiatric hospitals, and the offices of this company of Ricata itself. Um. And they were using in some cases, some of these cameras, including in hospitals, were using facial recognition and technology to identify and categorize people captured on the footage. UM. I

think about this. You are so in on the AI world. You talk about us not being prepared for Listen, there's great things to be had by it, but there's also a downside. We're not ready for it or not prepared for it. When you get into cyber security and infosect, this is just very scary stuff. I mean, the Chinese went into the Office of Personal Management in Washington, d C. And it walked off of like twenty million records of

everybody it's ever been considered for a security clearance. I mean the you know, the Russians, gay, we were in there within the last month and no telling. Nobody's him in telling the story of how thoroughly they penetrated the United States government. I mean, the emperor has no clothes either. This is not on the national agenda. And this is existential. If these people to turn off the US power created, which they do in a second, right now, I not

a tend people in the United States die. So this makes the whole COVID pandemic look like a common cold, you know, compared to I mean, this is very very serious stuff. This is existential stuff, and it's not on the national agenda. Yeah, it says another video shot inside the Tesla warehouse in Shanghai, so as workers on an assembly line, Hacker said they obtain access to two two cameras and Tesla factories and warehouses. Well, this is your world.

You're having conversations with people who are tapping into and working with you. Guys, you provide you know, enterprise AI software UM is anybody kind of aware of how to do this in a responsible way. I mean, this is your world. We've just got about thirty seconds time, and then we'll come back and talk some more. Yeah, I would chase. The organizations that are most equipped okay, and have the greatest levels of security as it relates to

AI and cybersecurity are the banks. I mean, these guys have have security regiments for their information and systems are completely aero gapped, they're tested, they have security protocols that are incredibly vigorous while they're dealing with the US banks or the European banks. These people have done us a perlative job, and the people in the United States government could go to school on that. They look like, you know, candidly, they look like cub scouts compared to the way that

banks handling information security. You've been kind enough to indulge us as we were breaking down these headlines on this major hack. You know, listen, Tom, you've been in the technology world for a long time. You've seen it evolved. It's gotten much more sophisticated, it's got a lot more invasive, it's gotten a lot more useful, and it's such a part of everything that we do. AI specifically talk to us about kind of what's front and center right now.

In terms of where it's going, who's using it, where it's going to be the most productive. Well, leading corporations around the world are using AI and smarting, analytics, precision medicine, aerospace, ACE, manufacturing, telecommunications, banking, and they're using AI to deliver better products and services, to deliver safer, cleaner, more reliable energy. They're using AI to secure data, data assets from cybersecurity attacks. They're using

AI and defense and intelligence. This is the largest this is we look at enterprise AI software. This is a third of a trillion dollars market in say so, this is the largest growing enterprise application software market in history. Okay, and we serve all segments of that industry, from banking

to tell go to healthcare to government. Listen, So give me AI for dummies, because I feel like we throw around certainly not you, but we throw around the term artificial intelligence a lot, and I think people have a grasp of it, but I don't think they understand, especially as you go through that list of basically are are all to be quite fair, whether it's military, whether it's you know, medical, whether it's energy. Um, where the use

of AI is making things so much better? What is the AI for dummies if you had to explain it to somebody, great question. Okay, so AI and so many to strip away all the all the mystique and all the noise. AI is an area that would call predictive analytics where we're able, due to kind of advances in information technology to solve problems that never been able to solve before, where we can predict things before they happen very accurately. Heart failure okay, diabetes okay, it's a failure

of a transformer in New York City. Okay, the failure of a jet engine, so we can predict these events, or the failure of a critical piece of equipment on an offshore or rig, say for Roald dutch Shell, where we can predict these events, you know, say days or months in advance, and replace the transformer in New York City and prevent the electricity outage. Okay, intervene uh clinically

and prevent the heart failure. Okay, you do some intervention on the machine and present the aircraft failure before it fails. That in a nutshell, that's what enterprise AI is all about, is predictive antltication that is accurately predicting events before they happen, and we're able to do that today with very high levels of precision. Well, and when it comes to something like healthcare, Listen, we have all been obsessed with our health care because our lives depended on it in the

last year. And understanding we all got I think it safe to say, somewhat smarter in understanding how vaccines are developed and the complications of you know, a virus and and all these things. When it comes to healthcare specifically, you talk about AI like we can predict heart failure. I mean, is this an area that we have yet to explore in a big way when it comes to a I yes, I think this is well, this is a field where we apply AI to healthcare. This is

what we call precision medicine. This will be the largest commercial application of AI. And for example, we can take the genome sequences and the health care records of say the population of the United States or any population okay, and apply machine learning algorithms to these data and predict with very high levels of precision, who is going to be diagnosed with what disease? Okay, in the next five years, heart disease, lung cancer, whatever it might be. And then

intervene clinically and avoid the diagnosis. Well this you combine that with telemedicine to reach previously unserved UM members of the community, and the economic and social benefit of this is staggering. Then you have genomes specifical medical protocols where where we you know, have tailored medical protocols to the individual genome, which are highly much going to be much more highly efficacious at a much lower cost. So these

are examples of a I applied to medicine. This will be again the largest application of ai UH in any field. It's funny, I feel like you're tying up our show so well because earlier we talked with the CEO Pacific Biosciences, who UH is involved in that sequencing, the you know, genetic sequencing. So it was it's wonderful how you tied up. But okay, it sounds so promising. Helped me out here, though, Then why isn't the community moving maybe the health care

community moving more rapidly towards embracing it. And I'm going to be fair here, I hope you'll see it that way. Your stocks down a lot, like what what is it that investors aren't getting about? The subject if it's so promising, or about your company that's so promising. Well, our company went public last December. Well we priced to stock at forty two. I think it's trading at about ninety today. It was all due respect, I think the company is

doing quite well the the But why the pullback? Is it just kind of like giving you guys some space here or what? I think that you know, I don't pretend to understand capital markets, and you know that's not my business. We're just building a company and the Eccles

stock price will take care of itself. But but I think that you know, if we look at the leaders in healthcare, whether it's c DC, whether it's an I age, we look at Cerner United Healthcare, these people are very very focused on precision medicine UH and applying AI to the medical process to deliver you know, more efficacious, more readily available, lower cost medicine and the result will be

a healthier population that lives longer. And so there are many organizations focused on this in a big way, massive amounts of research taking place, and a lot of this is being led by as it relates to COVID, by the c TH what we call the C three A Digital Transformation Institute, which an effort that we did with micro Soft and and M I T and Berkeley and Princeton and Carnegie Mellon and others. We're doing very very advanced research into playing I to understand pandemic and coursive

disease and drug discovery and what have you. So there's massive amounts of research going on in this area. Yeah, it feels like it's just such a world that just continues to open up. Hey, Tom, thank you so much. I always appreciated. Tom Siebel is founder, chairman and CEO at C three AI. And to be fair, the stock did I p O at forty two and as Tom mentioned, h it has more than doubled up from that amount. So good to get that in there.