C3.ai (AI) 2027财年第一季度业绩电话会议：联邦订单额激增，成本下降

C3.ai 2027财年第一季度业绩电话会议的核心在于其战略转型取得的初步进展、大幅削减成本以及联邦业务预订量的强劲增长。本季度营收为5240万美元，自由现金流转正至210万美元。

核心要点

• 2027财年第一季度营收为5240万美元。其中订阅营收贡献了4920万美元，占总营收的94%。
• 预订量同比增长73%，其中联邦预订量同比增长138%。C3.ai 在本季度签署了22份企业协议。
• Non-GAAP 营业亏损为3620万美元，比管理层指引区间的中点好830万美元。
• 自由现金流改善至正210万美元，而去年同期为负3430万美元，上一季度为负5480万美元。
• C3.ai 实现了约1.35亿美元的年化成本节约，其中包括在全公司范围内裁员约40%。
• 管理层维持2027财年全年营收指引为2.1亿至2.4亿美元，并强调将持续的季环比增长、自由现金流以及 Non-GAAP 盈利能力作为其核心目标。

核心财务数据

业务与运营表现

首席执行官 Thomas Siebel 表示，在转型的头三个月里，C3.ai 对其销售、产品和服务部门进行了重组。公司还重塑了成本结构，并引入了更严格的客户管理、销售管线开发以及运营审查机制。

C3.ai 签署了22份企业协议，合作伙伴包括海德堡材料（Heidelberg Materials）、强生（Johnson & Johnson）、福特汽车（Ford Motor Company）、C-SPAN、豪瑞集团（Holcim）、美国国防部、美国国防后勤局以及美国农业部。

联邦业务是主要增长驱动力，预订量同比增长138%。管理层表示，受竞品替代和新领域机会的共同支撑，联邦业务管线依然强劲，尤其是在国防和情报领域。

公司正将其产品战略集中在 C3.ai Agentic AI Platform、C3.ai Generative AI、C3.ai Studio 以及 C3.ai Code 上。管理层将 C3.ai Code 描述为未来的核心增长产品，能够从自然语言提示词中生成企业级 AI 应用，无需手动编写代码。

公司还在向更广泛的平台模式转型。现有企业级 AI 应用已被分割为嵌入在平台内部的可复用组件，允许客户按需组装应用。

管理层引用了 Forrester Research 的研究，该研究在数据建模、Agent 研发、应用开发工具、治理控制、平台管理和安全认证等领域将 C3.ai 评为第一。

管理层业绩指引

由于 C3.ai 在工程领域进行选择性投资，管理层预计第二季度 Non-GAAP 毛利率将放缓至40%中段水平。

在2027财年的剩余时间里，管理层预计自由现金流将与 Non-GAAP 营业亏损指引区间基本保持一致。预计部分重组带来的成本节约将在2027财年下半年开始完全体现。

风险与关注要点

执行力仍是 C3.ai 转型的核心问题。Siebel 表示，公司此前业绩不佳反映的是执行力问题，而非其产品、市场机遇或资产负债表的问题。

要达到全年营收指引区间的上限，需要实现显著的增速加快。管理层表示，其主要精力在于建立所需的销售管线和销售组织，以从第三财季开始实现持续的营收环比增长，而非专门瞄准指引区间的上限。

预计近期的工程投资将在第二财季将毛利率从50%拉低至40%中段水平。C3.ai 计划加大对前向部署工程师的投资，以支持现有客户，不过管理层预计从中长期来看，C3.ai Code 将减少对该资源的需求。

重组工作已接近尾声，但其规模（包括削减约40%的员工）要求在销售、产品和服务等各个部门继续保持严谨的执行力。

分析师问答环节亮点

• 联邦业务机遇：管理层表示，相关机遇包括替代某大型现任供应商以及争夺全新项目。管理层将部分潜在订单归因于客户对现任供应商的产品和商业做法感到不满。
• 前向部署工程：C3.ai 将增加对部署支持的近期投资，以帮助现有客户实现预期回报。管理层相信，随着时间的推移，通过 C3.ai Code 实现的自动化可以抵消部分人员需求。
• C3.ai Code 采用情况：该产品仍处于市场推广的早期阶段。管理层表示，客户可以从较小规模的部署开始，并随时间推移逐渐扩大，而无需一开始就购买数百万美元的产品。
• 平台战略：管理层证实，C3.ai 正朝着更加面向平台的模式转型，其中可复用的组件可以组装成预测性维护、需求预测和供应链优化等应用。
• 增长优先级：相比于不惜代价地去达成2027财年指引的上限，管理层更倾向于优先实现持续的营收环比增长、自由现金流以及最终的 Non-GAAP 盈利。

业绩电话会议完整文字记录

完整财报电话会议逐字稿

管理层陈述

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the C3.ai Fiscal First Quarter 2027 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] 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

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 Thomas Siebel, 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, 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. We advise 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 Siebel

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 1 quarter into the turnaround, I believe the company is on track.

In the past 3 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 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, products and services, and finance and 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. We came in 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 & Johnson, Ford Motor Company, C-SPAN, Holcim, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the U.S. 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.ai 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 #1 in data modeling, #1 in agent development, #1 in application development tools, #1 in cohesivity, experience, #1 in governance controls, #1 in platform management, #1 in security certification, and #1 in supporting services and offerings. 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 of the technology of achievement of C3.ai in the marketplace over the last 15 years.

Our primary offerings today include the C3.ai Agentic AI Platform, C3.ai Generative AI, C3.ai Studio, and more broadly, importantly, C3.ai Code. The C3.ai Studio is our control plane for developing and operating large-scale enterprise AI applications. And C3.ai Code is our Agentic AI application builder that turns a natural language prompt into a working enterprise AI application in minutes to hours.

C3.ai 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.ai Code, you can take a 1-hour RFP or you can take a 6-inch thick product specification. You can provide it to C3.ai Code. It assembles the data. It does the data aggregation. It autonomously builds the ontology. It develops the pipeline.

It builds machine learning models. It designs the user interface, and it autonomously delivers a working enterprise AI application without writing 1 line of manual code. This is really remarkable and you have to see it to believe it. C3.ai Code, broader platform adoption, federal systems growth, and sales discipline. 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 quickly, 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

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 engineering organization, we expect a 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 and 20 cents 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 close the quarter with $651.1 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities.

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 2027 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 2027 is $210 million to $240 million. Our guidance for non-GAAP loss from operations for fiscal year 2027 is $123 million to $155 million. For the remainder of fiscal year 2027, we expect our free cash flow to broadly align with a guidance range for non-GAAP loss from operations. Now I'd like to turn the call over to the operator to begin the Q&A session.

Operator

Certainly. Our first question for today comes from the line of Patrick Walravens from Citizens. Your question please.

分析师问答

Patrick Walravens

Tom, congratulations on the beginning of the turnaround here. 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 Siebel

The pipeline in federal looks very good and I would say 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 $1 billion to $1.5 billion like this month, and our next month, so there's, I'm sorry, $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. Thank you. So there are a lot of spending there, and we're getting a lot of traction. Thank you.

Patrick Walravens

Great, and then as a follow-up, Tom and Hitesh, 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.ai? And did you have forward-deployed engineers before? And if not, what are you doing differently here?

Thomas Siebel

We've always had forward-deployed engineers, I think going back to about 2014, I could be wrong by a year or 2. We've always had that function. And we need to be absolutely sure that each and every 1 of our satisfied 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.ai 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 near term, we're going to overinvest in existing customers to ensure they continue to realize the returns they're looking for.

Patrick Walravens

All right, great, thank you. We did see it by the way, we came in and did a demo and it was remarkable, that was a surprise. Six months ago, so I'm sure it's evolved a lot since then, but it was really pretty amazing. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of an Unknown Analyst from UBS. Your question please.

Unknown Analyst

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 Siebel

Well, we've been doing it for a while and I think it accelerated last quarter. 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 that federal just has been and remains a really good business sector for us.

Unknown Analyst

Got it. And just 1 quick follow-up. If we think about the high end of the full year guide does imply a pretty steep acceleration if you hit that. And I guess like my question is fundamentally 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, what gives you confidence that could happen?

Thomas Siebel

You know, I'll be honest with you. I'm less interested in hitting the high end of that guide that 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 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 3.5x, it'll be trading at a revenue multiple of 10x, 15x, 20x, or 25x, and I think that will bode well for our investors.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Latimore from Northland Capital Markets. Your question, please.

Mike Latimore

Yes, the C3.ai Code obviously sounds really interesting. Is that a meaningful part of the pipeline? Are you still kind of in early stages of marketing that?

Thomas Siebel

Honestly, Mike, we're in the early stages of marketing that, but hold on to your socks because it doesn't have to be a multi-million dollar acquisition. And so people could 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, and 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 1 day that replaces an enterprise application in 1 day. I mean, it's unbelievable.

Mike Latimore

Yes, that was great. And I mean, in the past, you've sort of promoted 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 Siebel

I think you nailed it, Mike, and we weren't that explicit about it. 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.

Going forward, all these applications have been broken down into their atomic particles. And atomic particles are, if you will, are embedded in the AI platform. And if you want to build 1 of these applications for predictive maintenance for aircraft or process optimization in oil refining, whatever it might be, you could 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.ai Code. So it is, what's going forward is a little bit different. It's a good, you know, insightful what you caught there.

Mike Latimore

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

Hitesh Lath

Yes, Mike, not a meaningful change from before. We will disclose that to the extent appropriate in our 10-Q, which will be out in a few days. I don't think there's any 1 customer.

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 Siebel

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. I think if they continue to execute their plans as they have been, this will bode well for C3.ai investors and that's the game we're playing.

Operator

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