How C3 AI was ‘the life of the party’ this past earnings season

Yahoo Finance’s Josh Schafer highlights how C3 AI took center stage this earnings season as artificial intelligence trends overtook investment priorities.

Video Transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: All right. As part of our look back at the quarter, Yahoo Finance's Josh Schafer is here with some superlatives to hand out. Josh, what's up first, my friend?

JOSH SCHAFER: All right, Dave, so we're going yearbook-style today. We're going to do a couple of different superlatives. We're going to start with, I think, my personal favorite, Life of the Party, right? Everyone wants to get Life of the Party.

DAVE BRIGGS: Was that you?

JOSH SCHAFER: It's pretty fun. I did not get Life of the Party.

DAVE BRIGGS: Oh.

JOSH SCHAFER: But I just think it's a fun one, right? So we got C3 AI as Life of the Party and, really, more broadly speaking, AI as a whole, right? AI was mentioned over a hundred times on a combination of earnings calls looking at Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia. And really, it's been interesting to see, guys, how the market has reacted to how different companies-- when they mention AI.

So different companies, as they've mentioned AI, they then sort of spike up. And it's been interesting to sort of see that stock market reaction from those companies. Now, one thing I did want to ask you guys, too, as far as AI goes, we're talking Life of the Party, something fun. I like Einstein, Salesforce's Einstein. What's your favorite AI name so far? We've got ChatGPT from OpenAI. Where are you guys leaning?

SEANA SMITH: I like ChatGPT. I don't know if it's just because I've said it so much that it just rolls off the tongue at this point, but ChatGPT makes a lot of sense to me in terms of its applications and what it's used for.

DAVE BRIGGS: It's the only one I've used, ChatGPT, and I think it's an incredible tool. Einstein, however, takes the prize there.

JOSH SCHAFER: I stumble too much on ChatGPT every time.

DAVE BRIGGS: Yeah, it doesn't roll.

SEANA SMITH: EinsteinGPT doesn't roll either. We need something a little bit more-- I guess Bard from Google is not bad, but I think you're just confused with what it is.

DAVE BRIGGS: Yeah, I don't like Bard.

SEANA SMITH: BardGPT, maybe. That also--

JOSH SCHAFER: All right, I do want to take a quick look at the stocks, as I was mentioning here. So you can see Nvidia, the way it sort of popped right here, that was after they mentioned AI a lot of times, on their earnings call, over 70 times. Investors seem to like it.

And then we'll take a quick look here, too. I want to show you what C3 AI has been up to this year. C3 AI had earnings on March-- in early March here, March 2. You can see that. That was an over 25% jump. And then you can really see how interested people have been just in the name as a whole.

This is a company that has-- is projecting profitability out in 2024, yet the stock is up 90% year-to-date, really sort of showing the excitement for AI. Not a lot of companies right now at a growth stage, growing this much with this much investor sentiment sort of piling into the name.