C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel outlines how AI will transform companies—and how the ‘RAG’ process can solve AI risks
Good morning.
I’ve spent the last two days at C3.ai’s Transform customer event in Florida, where CEO Tom Siebel gave one of the most coherent explanations I’ve heard of how AI will transform large companies. Siebel started at Oracle and founded Siebel Systems before launching C3.ai in 2009, so he has a unique perspective on where enterprise technology has been and where it is headed. He boiled it down to three phases:
—Enterprise software companies (Oracle, Siebel, others) gave large corporations control of their data and 20/20 hindsight into their performance and operations;
—Predictive AI allows corporations to use that data to predict the future, turning it into valuable intelligence;
—Generative AI democratizes that intelligence, making it accessible to everyone in the corporation through a natural language interface.
Siebel acknowledged the catalog of concerns that companies now have with generative AI—random responses, lack of traceability, no data controls, increased cyber risk, IP exposure, hallucinations. But he believes those will soon be solved through what’s called retrieval augmented generation (RAG) that allows large language models to provide the user interface, but then draws all information and intelligence from enterprise systems with deterministic and traceable responses and enterprise-quality data and IP controls. Remember that acronym—RAG—as it will be key to the future of using generative AI in large companies. (Full disclosure: C3.ai is a Fortune partner.)
For companies on this journey, Fortune will be continuing its series of AI learning events, in partnership with Accenture, at Fortune Brainstorm AI in London April 15-16. The team has a stellar group of experts lined up, including top executives from DeepMind, Microsoft, Palantir, Shell, Royal Philips, Maersk, as well as CEOs and founders of AI startups including Darktrace, EleutherAI, Precognition and more. You can learn more and request an invitation here, or shoot me a note.
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Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com