Even digital transformation rookies know that big data is the guiding principal of digital business — or was, at least. Now the big data noise has largely harmonized into a signal: artificial intelligence. If AI is the evolution of big data, do businesses now just follow the AI trail straight to the digital, data-driven promised land?

The hype around AI is thick enough these days to raise flags for even moderate skeptics. But when a 40-year technology business veteran gives his seal of approval, that is saying something. “I think this AI thing is not to be underestimated,” said Tom Siebel (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of C3 Inc., which does business as C3 IoT.

In fact, AI is the endgame of much of the most talked-about technologies alongside it today, Siebel believes. “I think the cloud, [internet of things], big data, devices — those are just enablers,” Siebel said.

He spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Tom Siebel in its Guest of the Week feature.

Listening to Siebel’s raspy plain talk, it would be easy to mistake him for a hard-bitten senior detective. The serial entrepreneur behind Siebel Systems, now owned by Oracle, likes to cut to the gristle and bone of tech trends and find out what they’re really good for. “This is my idea of a good time,” he said.

Artificial intelligence — or inferences drawn from predictive data analytics — is big data’s whole raison d‘être, according to Siebel. “People think big data is the fact that an exabyte is more than a gigabyte. That’s not it,” he said. Big data means data in its entirety; previously, analytics were confined to data samples, he explained. With elastic cloud infrastructure, limits on compute and storage have disappeared so that there is no sampling now; all data can be analyzed for prediction. “It’s a whole different game,” he added.

Companies that work intelligence from data into their business models are the future, and executives know this. They see what Uber Technologies Inc. has done in transportation without a single vehicle to its name. They see what Airbnb Inc. has done in the hotel industry, Siebel pointed out. Using data and technology in the way that these disruptive startups have is the digital transformation imperative, he added.

Data and AI fuel digital transformation

Now in his fourth decade in information technology, Siebel has seen the role of IT in organizations change. Software has inched more and more to the center of companies’ business models. Indeed, software is becoming the business full stop for many.

In the past, new tech sales pitches often fell on deaf ears in meetings with chief information officers, Siebel stated. Things are far different today. In their fever to ward off disruption, many companies have hired chief digital officers. In years past, the CIO would report to the chief executive officer once a quarter, he explained.

“The chief digital officer reports to the CEO every week,” Siebel said. Digital transformation has moved IT out of the back room and into the boardroom. “It’s a CEO-driven initiative,” he added.

The drive to keep up in this changing landscape is why big data and AI markets are growing so fast. Artificial intelligence technology revenue will grow from this year’s $12.5 billion to more than$46 billion by 2020, according to research from International Data Corp. And there are now more than 3,700 AI startups and counting, according to AngelList.

IoT as good as its ML and AI

C3 IoT is a software platform for connected “internet of things” devices. The company understands that connected devices are important for the data they collect, and artificial intelligence is what drives valuable insight from that data.

Connected IoT devices represent the “change in the form factor of the computers,” Siebel said. “In the future, everything’s a computer — your eye glasses, your watch, your heart monitor, your refrigerator, your pool pump — they’re all computers.” The data from these devices will drive machine learning, deep learning and AI, he added.

C3 IoT has leveraged ML heavily on its platform. “Now we’re exploiting deep learning in a big way using GPUs [graphics processing units] and a lot of the work that Jensen Huang’s doing at Nvidia.” Huang is founder, president and chief executive officer of GPU maker Nvidia Corp.

The ML-centric internet of things approach is proving agreeable to the large companies C3 IoT has been cutting deals with. John Deere, aka Deere & Co., is among them. And the U.S. Air Force is now using C3 IoT in AI-based predictive maintenance for aircraft platforms, such as E-3 Sentry (known as AWACS) and the F-16 aircraft.

C3 IoT grew 600 percent last year and it will finish this year with about 300 percent growth, according to Siebel.

AWS getting real in AI arms race

At AWS re:Invent last week, Amazon Web Services Inc. announced that it would add C3 IoT as a Machine Learning Competency partner. This makes C3 IoT a partner in three AWS competencies, the others being big data and internet of things.

This move by AWS shows the ML and AI arms race heating up among vendors.

“We expect the big three to continue to play a game of leapfrog over the next several years as the enterprise moves from experimental to industrialization of AI and machine learning,” Ken Corless, a principal in Deloitte Consulting’s cloud engineering practice, told Reuters. “Given their market share, AWS’ announcements are significant as they are signaling to the market that they will not cede this space to Microsoft or Google.”

Does this mean AI and the future IT market is up for grabs only to those “big three” cloud players? Siebel for one would not count his erstwhile workplace Oracle out of the race for prominence going forward. Having personally known Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison for decades, Siebel said, “Betting against Larry is a bad idea.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE