WASHINGTON — Raytheon’s intelligence and space business is partnering with C3.ai, a software company known for its predictive maintenance business with the U.S. Air Force, the companies announced Monday.
The alliance between C3.ai and Raytheon Intelligence and Space aims to speed up artificial intelligence adoption across the U.S. military. The partnership will pair Raytheon’s expertise in the defense and aerospace sector with C3.ai’s artificial intelligence development and applications.
“The military and intelligence community have access to more data now than any time in history, but it’s more than they’re able to make quick use of,” said David Appel, vice president of defense and civil solutions for space and C2 systems under Raytheon Intelligence and Space. “Artificial intelligence can be used to help them make sense of that data, which will allow them to make smarter decisions faster on the battlefield. And that’s just one of the benefits.”
In recent years, C3.ai has positioned itself as a trusted partner of the Air Force, providing predictive maintenance capabilities for the service’s E-3, C-5 Galaxy, F-15, F-16, F-18 and F-35 aircraft. The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley arm that helped bridge C3.ai into the Pentagon, the Defense Innovation Unit, estimated that the program could save the service $15 billion annually in maintenance funds if it was scaled to the Defense Department’s entire aircraft fleet.
In January, DIU awarded a five-year, $95 million contract to C3.ai for predictive maintenance. The alliance between the two companies will also focus on helping the intelligence community.
“Raytheon and C3.ai are driven by similar purposes: Anticipating and solving our customers’ most difficult problems,” said Thomas Siebel, CEO of C3.ai. “Together, we offer an end-to-end enterprise AI platform and mission-tailored applications that will dramatically reduce cost and risk, accelerate adoption and deployment of AI solutions, and scale the impact of AI across any organization.”
In September, the Air Force’s rapid sustainment office selected C3.ai’s C3 AI Suite platform and C3 AI Readiness product to support predictive maintenance across the service’s enterprise.
“Raytheon and C3.ai represent key partners for the U.S. Air Force, and specifically the Rapid Sustainment Office, in realizing the vision of harnessing AI to transform the military into a digital organization,” said Nathan Parker, deputy program executive officer for the Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office. “Fulfilling this vision of broad implementation requires identifying applicable use cases for AI across the Air Force, rapidly piloting solutions, and scaling successes across our enterprise to accelerate the transformation.”
Also on Monday, C3.ai announced that it will be launching an initial public offering. It expects shares to be valued between $31-$34.
Andrew Eversden covers all things defense technology for C4ISRNET. He previously reported on federal IT and cybersecurity for Federal Times and Fifth Domain, and worked as a congressional reporting fellow for the Texas Tribune. He was also a Washington intern for the Durango Herald. Andrew is a graduate of American University.
