Artificial intelligence (AI) software company C3.ai was revealed to have implemented layoffs last week, citing poor employee performance and the company's need to save costs. The media quoted people familiar with the matter as saying on Monday (November 21),Employees across the company were laid off. Last Thursday (November 16), an executive pointed out at a meeting attended by hundreds of employees,C3.ai needs to reduce costs.

According to reports,Management's decision to lay off employees is related to their individual performance. It is dismissal rather than layoffs. Many fired employees only received one month's severance pay.

It's unclear how many employees were affected. However, people familiar with the matter revealed that C3.ai had carried out similar layoffs about six months ago, and at that time it was also based on employee performance management.

The software company had 914 full-time employees as of April 30, including 746 in the United States and 168 in other countries, according to a regulatory filing.

Stock price shock

Since the beginning of the year, driven by the wave of generative artificial intelligence, C3.ai's stock price has more than doubled.

The company has been providing AI services to enterprise customers for more than a decade and launched its C3GenerativeAI product suite this year.

According to reports, this product suite integrates the latest AI capabilities and the most advanced models from OpenAI, Google and academia. The first product, C3GenerativeAIforEnterpriseSearch, can quickly locate, retrieve and present all relevant data in the entire corpus of enterprise information systems, providing enterprise users with a transformative user experience.

However, once news of the layoffs became public on Monday,The company's stock price fell off a cliff, falling below $30. Not only did it wipe out all gains during the day, but the stock price once fell to $27.34, a drop of 6.7%, and the drop narrowed to 4.35% at the close.


A C3.ai spokesperson later said in a statement,The company continues to recruit and fill open positions to drive growth in the company's strategic areas.

In September this year, C3.ai estimated in an annual forecast that the company's operating losses for this fiscal year would be as high as $100 million, one-third higher than the previous guidance, which had previously believed that its full-year operating losses were expected to be between $50 million and $75 million. The company's explanation for this is that it wants to invest further in its generative artificial intelligence products.