C3.ai, an enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) software provider for accelerating digital transformation, has announced the winners of the C3.ai COVID-19 Grand Challenge. Launched on 15 September, the global competition encouraged developers, data scientists, students and creative minds to build world-class data science techniques and strategies that accelerate novel COVID-19 research and drive smart and safe decision-making. It represented an opportunity to inform decision-makers at the local, state and federal levels and transform the way the world confronts this pandemic. Submissions were reviewed on the basis of their scientific merit; the use of AI, machine learning and/or other data science techniques; and the incorporation of at least two data sources from the C3.ai COVID-19 Data Lake. The evaluation process also considered the extent to which the derived data science insights, if implemented at scale, will result in significant public health and economic benefit.