C3.ai Inc. has lifted the lid off a new “agentic” software development platform it’s calling C3 Code, which is capable of transforming natural language requests into production-ready applications fully autonomously.

Unveiled today, C3 Code is said to shift the focus from artificial intelligence-assisted coding to fully automated development. It relies on powerful and autonomous AI agents that are deeply integrated with the company’s C3 Agentic AI Platform in order to automate the entire application development lifecycle. For each new request, it will begin with the initial design of the app, conduct the necessary data modeling, then test and finally deploy it in production.

According to C3 AI, this release has the effect of reducing software development timelines from several months to just a few hours. The company said it’s trying to solve the “last mile” challenge associated with generative AI code.

Though tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex have made it possible to create snippets of code quickly, building a production-grade enterprise application remains an entirely different ball game. In most cases, a small army of data scientists is required to connect the necessary data sources for the app in question, while developers are needed to oversee everything and security engineers must ensure that new apps are secure and regulatory compliant.

Moreover, many existing “no-code” or “low-code” tools struggle with complex enterprise requirements around predictive maintenance or global supply chain logistics. The apps they create simply don’t work well outside of test environments, so many companies never get beyond the prototyping stage.

How does it work?

C3 Code is meant to go further and get AI-generated enterprise applications into the hands of business workers. It acts like an orchestrator for multiple AI agents that can work in parallel or in sequence, so instead of human developers manually stitching together various databases and application programming interfaces, they can simply describe a business problem in plain English.

The platform is powered by a number of key technical features, including the C3 AI Type System, which is a unified abstraction layer that enables AI agents to connect with live, governed data across multiple sources with zero manual integration work. Its prebuilt AI agents are specialized in all of the most common tasks that go into app development, such as building data models, configuring machine learning pipelines and generating conversational interfaces. It also features a number of application templates for industries such as defense, healthcare and manufacturing.

These components all add up to create a suite of tools that can build extremely complex applications, C3 AI promised. It gave examples, such as a user prompting it to create a supply chain intelligence application. In response to that prompt, C3 Code will automatically discover and ingest the necessary data from the company’s enterprise resource planning system and logistics databases. Once that’s done, it will configure a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline, before deploying a geospatial dashboard that’s able to track inventory shortages in real time.

It remains to be seen how well C3 Code works in production, but the company has a considerable advantage over its competitors because it’s one of the oldest AI companies around. Its core C3.ai Application Platform has bundled the tools and services needed to build intelligent, enterprise-grade applications for years already. The major difference now is that, unlike the flagship platform, C3 Code does not require human developers to get their hands dirty.

The company has bolstered its claims through the results of an independent evaluation conducted by Anthropic PBC’s Claude, which rated C3 Code’s application generation capabilities alongside those of models such as OpenAI Group PBC’s Codex (6.0) and Palantir Systems Inc.’s AIP (7.7). C3 Code did especially well in terms of “domain intelligence,” scoring a perfect 10 out of 10.

C3 AI Chief Executive Stephen Ehikian said C3 Code introduces a new paradigm that “changes everything” for software development. “From this day forward, enterprise AI is fully agentic, autonomous, intuitive and fast,” he promised. “A single team member can describe a business problem in plain English and C3 Code delivers a complete, governed, production-grade AI application. This is not assisted development; it is AI designing and building enterprise AI.”

The company also said C3 Code is “open by design,” which means customers can use it with multiple large language models, switching them out while retaining full portability of their applications and data.

Images: C3 AI