C3.ai hosted a sold-out Girl Geek X event in its Silicon Valley headquarters on Thursday, January 17, with more than 175 people in attendance. The evening focused on the business applications of artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on data science, application development, and real-world AI use cases.

C3.ai Board member and co-founder Pat House kicked off the program, with an overview of C3.ai software. The C3 AI Suite provides end to end capabilities to rapidly build enterprise-scale AI applications for a spectrum of industrial use cases. On the topic of multicloud, Pat explained that organizations can develop a C3.ai application for one cloud platform, such as AWS, and it can run without modification on Azure, Google Cloud, or edge/private cloud devices.

Presenters from engineering, field solutions, marketing, and data science shared stories about their careers at C3.ai and explained various aspects of C3.ai technologies and applications.

Analytics applications and tools

Senior Manager of Application Engineering Maggie Wang reflected on her six-and-a-half-year tenure at C3.ai and two meaningful projects she worked on. The first was fraud detection and sensor health applications for a specific energy customer. Fraud detection uses AI analytics to identify suspicious activities to streamline investigation efforts. Sensor health is an AI application that helps predict sensor issues and manage network health issues. To build these applications, Maggie and her team developed 140 complex analytics. The second project, in 2015, was building the first C3.ai capabilities to help application developers, data scientists, and business analysts better visualize analytics. Today, Maggie and her team are working on the C3 Integrated Development Studio, an advanced set of visual tools for the C3 AI Suite.

Data Science at C3.ai

Senior Data Scientist Amy Lee talked about what her role entails and how she entered the field of data science. Most data scientists study statistics, computer science, or physics, but Amy has a background in finance. At C3.ai, she has worked on a variety of machine learning applications with customers in manufacturing, aerospace, and finance. Using C3.ai software, Amy is building applications such as fraud detection, natural language processing, and inventory optimization very rapidly. Amy is able to focus on ML model development and deployment because the C3 AI Suite minimizes data access and processing tasks and time.

Predictive Maintenance for Aerospace

Product Manager Lila Fridley walked attendees through the C3 Predictive Maintenance application for aerospace. In her role on the product team, Lila works across engineering, data science, services, and marketing, to design, specify, and deploy C3.ai products. C3 Predictive Maintenance reduces unplanned downtime for aircraft fleets and enables optimized maintenance schedules and resource utilization. The C3.ai application addresses the decision-making needs of managers, helps supply chain specialists and maintenance analysts with inventory visibility and scheduling, and improves flight line maintainers’ troubleshooting capabilities.

Anti-Money Laundering

Forward Deployed Solution Manager Yubing Ji detailed C3.ai work in the field with customers, using the recent trial of C3 Anti-Money Laundering as an example. The 12-week trial at a global bank used data from six source systems to increase the identification of potential money laundering activity by 200% and reduced false positives by 85%.

Olympic Lessons

The final presenter of the evening, Merel Witteveen discussed how being an Olympic athlete informs her role as C3.ai Vice President of marketing. After winning a silver medal in sailing for the Dutch sailing team, Merel turned her focus to business. She joined C3.ai in the products team, to build new capabilities for customers like Royal Dutch Shell. Today, she has taken the helm of the C3.ai marketing team.

Panel Discussion

To conclude the event, Pat moderated a panel with Maggie, Yubing, SVP and General Counsel Kira Kimhi, and Sr. Director Jo Ann Hartley, taking questions from the audience. Topics ranged from questions about C3.ai applications, to work-life balance, to how best to navigate career moves.

Girl Geek X is a community for women in technology. The C3.ai Girl Geek X event was held in Redwood City on January 17, 2019.