Did AI cut 26 percent of C3 AI? Its SEC filing says cost structure, while its CEO says agentic AI made the rest of the staff 100 times more productive

C3 AI, the enterprise-AI vendor, told the SEC on 25 February 2026 that its board had approved a restructuring plan including "a 26% reduction in its global workforce", already substantially complete, with $10 million to $12 million in severance and related charges. The 8-K gives the reason as improving "operating efficiency", and new chief executive Stephen Ehikian told shareholders the cost structure was "simply too high" and that "we were not organized appropriately". On the same call he described what the remaining staff now do differently: in five weeks he had "restructured products, engineering, sales, marketing, and customer services to leverage state-of-the-art agentic AI across these business entities to dramatically increase the productivity of our people, in many cases by up to 100 times", and said that despite the workforce reduction the company expected productivity to "increase multifold across the board". The two statements sit side by side without being joined: the filing that carries the legal weight attributes the cut to costs after a quarter in which revenue fell to $53 million from $99 million a year earlier, and the AI productivity claim is offered as what comes next, not as why people went. That is why this is an article and not a counted AI job loss. Roughly 280 people were affected on a headcount of about 1,075 in January.