A billionaire relative of California Gov. Gavin Newsom's wife is hosting a major fundraiser for former President Trump in California on Friday, according to reports. Tom and Stacey Siebel are hosting a fundraiser in the Bay Area community of Woodside for Trump on Friday afternoon. Tom Siebel, a billionaire software developer and CEO of his own enterprise AI software company, C3.ai, is a second cousin once removed of Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Los Angeles Times reported. Tom Siebel has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump's 2024 campaign and PACs supporting the Republican nominee, according to the Times and the San Francisco Gate. Newsom has been a vocal critic of Trump and was a surrogate for President Biden's now-defunct re-election campaign.

I had a couple questions I had wanted to ask Tom Siebel ever since his company, C3.ai (ticker "AI") went public in December of 2020. When I finally get my chance, I have to wait a moment, because Siebel is irrepressible. He often has the advantage on a reporter, leading with a kind of gusto that eclipses the standard question and answer protocol. "I had an epiphany this week," Siebel tells me, over a Greek coffee at a Greek joint in midtown Manhattan, Friday afternoon. Siebel, in the course of meeting with investors in New York and Boston this week, including Fidelity, has had reason to crystallize his thoughts about what artificial intelligence means, at least for his company and his customers. It is a good time to go on the road. At a recent stock price of $24.24, C3.ai shares are down sixty-five percent in the past year, twenty-two percent this year, and seventy-four percent since the IPO. And the entire software market is somewhat in the toilet as valuations are revised across the board.

C3.ai, which is a top provider of enterprise AI software and services, is a newly public company. It pulled off its deal in December and issued 15.1 million shares at $42 each. And this would not be the end of the gains. Within a couple months, the stock price would hit an all-time high of $183. But as the markets started to cool off, so did the shares of C3.ai.

The oil and gas industry is turning to AI to help cut operating costs, predict equipment failure, and increase oil and gas output. A faulty well pump at an unmanned platform in the North Sea disrupted production in early 2019 for Aker BP, a Norwegian oil company, according to an account in the Wall Street Journal. The company installed an AI program that monitors data from sensors on the pump, flagging glitches before they can cause a shutdown, stated Lars Atle Andersen, VP of operations for the firm. Now he flies in engineers to fix such problems ahead of time and prevent a shutdown, he stated. Aker BP employed a solution from SparkCognition of Austin, Texas.

Silicon Valley's Jim Breyer explains why today's new AI companies are built differently than previous software and web startups. Q: Your old firm, Accel Partners, invested in a broad range of tech startups. Your new firm exclusively invests in AI. Breyer: I'm two years into a ten-year investment business plan in AI, and it's been fascinating. I spend a lot of time at universities around the world and am on various boards at Harvard, Stanford and Tsinghua University in China.

C3 IoT won a multi-year deal artificial intelligence and Internet of Things deal with 3M. The customer win is a big one for C3 IoT, which has been gaining momentum as an IoT platform and has some of the largest production implementations. For 3M, C3 IoT is one vendor in the mix of a multi-year business transformation effort. Read also: What is the IoT? Everything you need to know about the Internet of Things right now What is AI? Everything you need to know about Artificial Intelligence All executive guides Previously, 3M moved to a single instance of ERP via SAP. For 2017, 3M delivered sales of $31.7 billion, up 5.1 percent from 2016, and net income of $4.86 billion.

Bloomberg's Cory Johnson invited Tom Siebel, whom he called a "titan of enterprise software," as a featured guest on today's Bloomberg Technology TV show to address the exponential growth rate in the adoption of disruptive new technologies, such as AI and IoT, by CEOs and boards worldwide. In a segment called "How C3 IoT is Capitalizing on Digital Transformation," Siebel explained how he has taken a page from evolutionary biology in applying the concept of punctuated equilibrium to make sense of the enormous disruption happening today in the corporate world. Companies are using a step function of information technology available in the 21st century to change everything about the way they manage their business processes and design and deliver products and services, Siebel said. "It's like nothing we've seen before," Siebel added. "CEOs have a choice – either get on the train or on the tracks!"

Tom Siebel is a legend in enterprise software, having sold his company, Siebel Systems, to Larry Ellison's Oracle (ORCL) in 2006 for $5.85 billion. The C3 technology is a cloud computing service that runs in conjunction with Amazon.com's It allows one to gather all the data sources for a given domain, such as energy metering, and perform machine learning to detect patterns that can save industries billions of dollars. The showcase customer is Enel Spa, the €85 billion Italian electric utility, the largest such utility in the world outside of China, involving millions of meters. Of the new generation of enterprise companies, Workday (WDAY), and Salesforce (CRM), he offers praise.

Tom Siebel is a legend in enterprise software, having sold his company, Siebel Software, to Larry Ellison's Oracle (ORCL) in 2006 for $3.4 billion. You might not immediately suspect that about him in person. His mop of curly hair and his thoughtful expression give him the air of a Bob Dylan of technology, an artist, while his youthful enthusiasm suggests he's still on the Silicon Valley startup road trip, even though at age 64, he's seen four decades of the tech world's evolution. Unlike many very accomplished people, he deflects from his own ego and endows his peers in tech, such as Ellison, with heaps of praise, calling them "brilliant" "very, very smart," or "so, so smart." Siebel recently swung by the Barron's offices to chat about C3 IoT, his next company, which he claims has already surpassed established firms such as IBM (IBM) and GE (GE) in the Internet of Things.

Programmers in the midrange space are used to coding IBM i applications, like ERP, supply chain, and retail management systems, using RPG, Java, and COBOL. It's simply what they do. But what happens when machines program themselves and react to events in real time? One impact, according to prominent members of the software industry, is the end of the enterprise software business as we know it. Led by Web giants like Google and Facebook, the computing industry is making rapid advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).