C3.ai Criticized for Product Delays, Tom Siebel’s Micromanaging

The AI hype cycle has birthed innumerable boosters. An unlikely member of this group is Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Siebel.

Since selling his first company to Oracle Corp. in 2006, Siebel started C3.ai Inc., an ostensibly cutting-edge software firm that helps customers crunch and analyze huge amounts of data. The 70-year-old founder has become a regular on the business press circuit and posited that C3’s new generative artificial intelligence product will “change the nature of the human-computer interface” and its release could be an “iPhone moment.”

Investors, with a newly insatiable appetite for anything AI, have eaten it up. In ...