Stephen Ehikian – one of the driving forces behind implementing the General Services Administration’s (GSA) OneGov initiative, has been named chief executive officer at C3 AI, a Redwood City, Calif.-based enterprise artificial intelligence software company, according to a Sept. 3 announcement from the company.
Ehikian most recently has been serving as GSA’s deputy administrator – and before that as the agency’s acting administrator – beginning in January 2025.
During that time and since April of this year, Ehikian has been pushing forward GSA’s OneGov program. The initiative aims to modernize and streamline federal IT acquisitions and has negotiated substantial and wide ranging service pricing discounts for federal agencies with Oracle, Elastic, Google, Adobe, Salesforce, Docusign, OpenAI, Box, Anthropic, Microsoft, and ServiceNow.
Many of those agreements include AI-related services, and GSA officials have said the OneGov agreements are aimed at implementing the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan published in July.
“I am honored to join C3 AI at such a pivotal time in the AI era,” Ehikian said in the company’s announcement of his appointment.
“C3 AI is one of the most important companies in the AI landscape and enterprise software, with a platform and applications that are unmatched,” he said, adding, “I am confident that we will be able to capture an increasing share of the immense market opportunity in Enterprise AI.”
GSA did not respond to inquiries on Sept. 3 about Ehikian’s move.
“Under the leadership of Stephen Ehikian, we have the rare combination of the right person, at the right company, in the right market, at the right time,” commented C3 AI Executive Chairman Thomas Siebel.
Prior to signing on with GSA at the beginning of this year, Ehikian was CEO and cofounder at Airkit.ai from 2018 to 2013, and before that was vice president of product at Salesforce.