C3 AI Inc. today debuted a new version of its C3 Generative AI platform that organizations can access through the AWS Marketplace.

Redwood City, California-based C3 sells software that eases the task of developing custom artificial intelligence models. It also offers prepackaged AI applications for use cases such as predicting customer demand and optimizing buildings’ energy usage. C3 generated $72.4 million in revenue last quarter, topping the $71.6 million that analysts had expected.

One of the company’s flagship offerings is a platform called C3 Generative AI that rolled out last May. It allows knowledge workers to search their organizations’ internal data for specific items using natural language prompts. Additionally, the platform can run analyses to find useful patterns in that data.

The platform is built to process both structured and unstructured records. C3 Generative AI: AWS Marketplace Edition, the new version of the platform that debuted today, has a narrower focus. It’s designed to help users more easily analyze text stored in files such as Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and webpages.

TheAWS Marketplace Edition also adds a self-service setup tool. According to C3, the tool enables customers to deploy the platform in as little as a few minutes.

After completing the setup process, users receive access to a ChatGPT-like chat interface. They can upload a set of business records and have C3 Generative AI: AWS Marketplace Edition extract data points of interest. The platform is also capable of running mathematical calculations on users’ data, for example to measure the percentage by which store sales increased from one quarter to the next.

Under the hood, C3 Generative AI: AWS Marketplace Edition uses a machine learning technique called RAG to power several of its features. Neural networks can usually only generate answers to user queries based on the data on which they were trained. RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation, allows an AI model to draw on data from external sources such as a company’s internal business documents.

“Search is bigger than simply finding a piece of information within a mountain of documents,” said C3 Chief Executive Officer Thomas Siebel. “It’s about finding insights within that data quickly and being able to act on them immediately and securely, changing the possibilities of what enterprises can accomplish.”

C3 plans to make the C3 Generative AI: AWS Marketplace Edition accessible to a limited number of customers on Nov. 29. The platform will move into general availability a few weeks later. It’s rolling out two months after the company introduced another new offering, the C3 Generative AI Suite, that includes more than two dozen AI models optimized for tasks such as summarizing text and powering chatbots.

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