Entrepreneur, author and C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel is credited with inventing the roughly $40 billion worldwide CRM market, but he sees an even bigger opportunity with AI. Joining TM Forum CEO Nik Willetts for a one-on-one interview during Digital Transformation World Series, Siebel said AI should represent a big business opportunity for CSPs because the advances other industries are making with AI and digital transformation “will be highly dependent on the availability of these 5G technologies.”Siebel’s company,
C3.ai, focuses on a category it calls enterprise AI. He explained C3.ai has invested more than a billion dollars over the past decade to build its platform, which provides AI-based software services across a broad variety of vertical industries with an emphasis on delivering both economic benefits and social value. In most cases, C3.ai customers have attempted to build their own AI capabilities first only to turn to an expert partner for a better platform, Siebel said.
Why digital transformation drives the AI market
A primary driver of the cross-industry interest in AI is digital transformation.
“Digital transformation has risen to the top of virtually every CEO’s agenda,” Siebel explained. “[It is] about applying predictive analytics across all aspects of the value chain of every industry we can think of.”
Siebel noted that players in medicine, aerospace, defense, manufacturing and range of other industries are using AI to fundamentally change everything about the way they do business. He said the AI market opportunity is so substantial as a result that one might “think of this as an entire replacement market for everything we’ve done in enterprise application software in the last three decades.”
Do CSPs have a future in AI?
Asked what telecom’s role in the AI world will be, Siebel provided a broader perspective, citing five key technologies that are accelerating IT development, including “elastic cloud computing, big data, the internet of things, and importantly, broadband communications and especially 5G.”
Willetts asked whether other industries take for granted that 5G will be available as they define roadmaps that might depend on it.
“When I wrote the book
Digital Transformation, I kind of took 5G for granted and that was probably a mistake because 5G is certainly an enabler,” Siebel said, adding that because many other industries’ digital transformation plans depend on both 5G and AI, “there is a huge role for CSPs to play in this as technology providers.”
Siebel predicts that the largest opportunity for AI will be in “precision medicine,” where CSPs can play a key role. As AI is used to improve diagnostic precision massively, telemedicine will “bring it to a broader and historically underserved audience,” he explained.
“[AI will] fundamentally change everything about medicine,” he said. “The social and economic benefits are simply incalculable.”
