C3.ai's Agentic AI Push Scales Up: Can it Fuel a New Growth Cycle?

C3.ai, Inc. AI is sharpening its focus on the emerging Agentic AI segment, a business line that is quickly evolving into a meaningful contributor to revenue and long-term growth. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, the company reported that its Agentic AI deployments are leading to an annualized run rate of $60 million, with applications spanning mission-critical environments in defense, manufacturing, government and energy.

C3.ai’s early patent on agentic AI, secured in late 2022, sets it apart in an increasingly crowded AI landscape. The company is delivering production-grade AI agents purpose-built for autonomous decision-making. These agents are operational across over 100 use cases, including predictive maintenance for the U.S. Air Force’s PANDA platform and global fuel monitoring for the Defense Logistics Agency’s Pluto system.

Crucially, the company is leveraging its trusted partner ecosystem to scale the reach of its Agentic AI solutions. A newly formed strategic alliance with PwC allows C3.ai to combine its agentic capabilities with PwC’s deep advisory expertise, targeting verticals such as financial services, manufacturing and utilities. The initiative complements its alliances with Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud and McKinsey QuantumBlack, contributing to rapid adoption. The company has made a disciplined push to ensure its partners are fully enabled, with demo tools, training programs and co-sell strategies in place to drive execution globally.

C3.ai believes its Agentic AI business is materially undervalued. Management stated that if the unit were carved out as a standalone, it could command a valuation multiple above the company’s entire current market cap, backed by IP strength, customer traction and real-world impact. With enterprise use cases accelerating and customer references spanning Shell, Dow, Cargill and the U.S. Navy, the agentic AI portfolio is well-positioned to scale and drive growth in the coming periods.

How It Stacks Up to Competitors

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. CDNS is pursuing agentic AI from a product development lens, embedding intelligent automation across the semiconductor design stack. Through its Cerebrus and Conformal AI ECO flows, the company enables AI-driven enhancements in areas like logic synthesis and low-power optimization. In the first quarter of 2025, Cadence reported that over 50% of all customer chip designs now integrate AI-enabled workflows, with partnerships expanding across foundries and hyperscalers. Cadence is collaborating with NVIDIA Corporation NVDA to co-develop a full-stack agentic AI system for science and engineering, built on the Llama Nemotron Reasoning Model. While promising, Cadence’s agentic AI remains tightly coupled to EDA toolchains, with a narrower application scope compared to C3.ai’s enterprise-grade agents.

SoundHound AI, Inc. SOUN is approaching the agentic AI opportunity through conversational AI and customer-facing voice agents. In the first quarter of 2025, the company launched Amelia 7.0, an enterprise-ready agentic platform capable of autonomous task execution across healthcare, hospitality and financial services. Its Agentic Plus framework enables fleets of voice-powered agents to transact, reason and respond without human intervention. SoundHound has already deployed the technology across 13,000 restaurant locations and secured OEM pilots for in-vehicle voice commerce. While SoundHound’s edge lies in multimodal, multilingual voice AI integration, its agentic use cases remain consumer-centric and are mostly confined to front-end service automation.

AI’s Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates

Shares of C3.ai have gained 39.7% in the past three months compared with the industry’s growth of 9.5%.