Stephen Ehikian


Stephen Ehikian is the chief executive officer of C3 AI, an enterprise artificial intelligence company, and a former government official during the Trump administration between January and September 2025. Ehikian was appointed Acting Administrator and Deputy Administrator of the General Services Administration on January 21, 2025. In March 2025, he delegated the responsibilities of deputy administrator to senior adviser Mike Lynch. In July 2025, he was replaced as acting administrator by Michael Rigas, but remained at GSA in his role as deputy administrator. Prior to GSA, Ehikian was the Vice President of AI Products at Salesforce and cofounded a startup named Airkit.ai.
On September 2, 2025, Ehikian announced that he would be stepping down from his role as GSA deputy administrator. On September 3, C3 AI announced that Ehikian had been appointed CEO effective September 1.

Education and early career

Stephen Ehikian obtained undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Economics from Yale University. He later obtained a Master of Business Administration degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which he pursued jointly with a master of science degree in Environment and Resources.
Early in his career, Ehikian worked in the finance sector with positions at Morgan Stanley, Westbrook Partners, and SRS Investment Management.
Ehikian is from Atherton, California. He is married to Andrea Conway, who was a designer at X. His brother is Brad Ehikian, partner at Palo Alto-based commercial real estate firm Premier Properties.

Business career

RelateIQ

After completing his MBA, Ehikian served as COO of startup RelateIQ, which was founded by Palantir alumni Steve Loughlin and Adam Evans in 2011. RelateIQ was a sales-intelligence startup that automatically captured data from email, calendar, phone records, and other communications to provide real-time insights and recommendations for managing customer relationships.
RelateIQ raised $9 million in Series A funding from investors Accel, Morgenthaler, and SV Angel. It emerged out of stealth in June 2013, announcing a $20 million Series B round led by Formation 8 and Accel. It then raised a $40 million Series C round in March 2014 at a $245 million valuation. In July 2014, Salesforce acquired RelateIQ in a stock swap transaction valued at $350 million in Salesforce shares, plus $40 million from RelateIQ’s cash balance, for a total acquisition price of $390 million. Ehikian and Evans continued working at Salesforce post-acquisition.
In September 2015, as part of the 2015 Dreamforce conference, RelateIQ was rebranded as SalesforceIQ. On March 13, 2020, the SalesforceIQ product was retired.

Airkit.ai

In 2017, Ehikian and Evans left Salesforce to co-found the startup originally known as Ruist, later rebranded as Airkit, and subsequently Airkit.ai in stealth mode. The startup offered a low-code customer engagement platform for businesses to quickly build digital customer applications and workflows without extensive coding expertise. It charged businesses a subscription fee for the license to use its platform to build apps, and it also charged based on the volume of usage. Ehikian served as CEO and Evans as CTO.
Airkit emerged from stealth mode in October 2020, announcing it had raised $28 million in funding from investors Accel, Emergence Capital, and Salesforce Ventures including a $21 million Series A round in January 2020. Airkit announced a $40 million Series B round led by EQT Ventures in May 2021.
In August 2023, the company rebranded as Airkit.ai and launched Airkit.ai eCommerce, a platform powered by ChatGPT-4 for retail brands to build autonomous customer-service AI agents. In October 2023, Salesforce signed an agreement to acquire Airkit for an undisclosed amount after which Airkit was integrated into Salesforce’s Service Cloud, with Evans continuing as head of that business unit. As part of the acquisition Ehikian was to continue as a non-executive employee at Salesforce through February 2024 to facilitate the success of the acquisition.
Salesforce used technology from the acquisition to launch Agentforce, its platform that allows companies to build and deploy autonomous AI agents.

Career as Trump administration political appointee

Ehikian was appointed Acting Administrator and Deputy Administrator of the GSA on January 21, 2025. As acting administrator of GSA, Ehikian oversaw federal real estate and buildings, technology services, and $110 billion in federal contracts. During his first week as acting administrator, Ehikian outlined his goals of relocating agencies outside of D.C., removing DEI, environmental, and climate mandates on federal building construction and GSA contractors, and downsizing GSA's building portfolio. In February 2025, the GSA notified staff that it intended to reduce total spending by 50% across all programs and personnel.
On February 18, Ehikian appointed Frank Schuler as senior adviser, who coordinated with DOGE member Nate Cavanaugh. ProPublica reported that Schuler had for years been promoting and profiting from "syndicated conservation easements", a tax-shelter scheme that financial authorities tried to shut down for years. At the time, Schuler's firm was battling the IRS in court for over $4 billion in disallowed charitable deductions for thousands of his clients.
On April 21, 2025, Ehikian was sued as part of a lawsuit filed by Harvard University alleging its funding freezes were illegal. Harvard later won the lawsuit.
In July 2025, Ehikian was replaced as acting administrator by Michael Rigas and moved into a supporting deputy director role within GSA.

Sale of federal properties

GSA announced the reduction of its real estate portfolio by 50%, and plans to terminate 660 building leases by the end of 2025. On March 4, the GSA published a list of 443 properties to be sold, including headquarters, courthouses, and 47 Social Security Administration offices. That list was edited the same day to remove about 120 properties and then taken off the GSA website the next day. The public list included a previously undisclosed "highly sensitive federal complex in Springfield, Virginia" where the CIA conducts clandestine operations. GSA has also sent out over 800 lease termination notices, followed by 117 letters rescinding some of them.

Workforce reductions

Employees at the GSA were urged to take the so-called Fork in the Road resignation offer. In late January 2025, Ehikian wrote to employees "If you do not accept the deferred resignation offer, and are later impacted by future reduction in force or consolidation efforts, this offer will generally not be available to you."
On February 4, 2025, Ehikian told employees that the deferred resignation was just the "first step in streamlining the federal workforce." He stated that "returning to office will be the next step." He also said the GSA was looking to close and consolidate its 11 regional offices and 700 field offices across the US. Employees were told to report to the office full-time starting March 3. Ehikian warned the approximately 2,000 employees who live more than 50 miles from the nearest regional office that there was a "high probability" they may be assigned to an office farther away as part of the push to reduce the GSA’s footprint.
The Washington Post noted that the messaging appeared deliberately designed to increase attrition, as employees would not know if they had been reassigned to a farther office until days after they had to decide whether to accept voluntary resignation. An internal memo from May 22 noted that there were only 1,000 workstations for 1,200 employees at headquarters, and employees without a desk were told to look for "non-traditional seating options" like conference rooms and tables in the building’s atrium.
In February 2025, Ehikian called for cutting GSA's largest division, the Public Building Service, by more than 3,500 employees or 63% of the total workforce. In February 2025, the GSA dismissed about 100 tech workers within its Technology Transformation Services who were in their one year probationary period and, therefore, had weaker job protections. Various offices within the agency were called to meetings to justify their positions to Ehikian and other political appointees. Senior executives called those meetings "murder boards." Ehikian was a proponent of using artificial intelligence to reduce headcount with some GSA employees being asked to identify ways AI could automate their work responsibilities.
On February 24, 2025, Ehikian warned employees that the agency would be conducting a reduction in force and was also seeking to offer employees Voluntary Early Retirement Authority.
On Saturday, March 1, 2025, the GSA eliminated 18F, a digital consulting office within GSA's Technology Transformation Services, and fired its 70 tech workers at 1:00 a.m. 18F employees reported that they had been locked out of their computers and emails, and that they could not find out where to return equipment. 18F had previously been the target of false claims from rightwing activists and from Elon Musk that it was a far-left cell inside the government.
On March 3, 2025, the GSA issued reduction-in-force notices to approximately 600 employees with nearly 40% of the staff at its San Francisco office being let go. Then, on March 5, 2025 the agency issued reduction-in-force notices to more than 90% of its 200 employees at the northwest region of its Public Buildings Service. On March 6, 2025 the GSA issued notices to nearly all its staffers at the Office of the Chief Financial Officer in the Washington, D.C. area.
On March 3, 2025, Ehikian closed at least five regional offices of the fine arts and historic preservation units at the GSA, and placed more than 36 staffers on leave pending their terminations. The group preserved and maintained over 26,000 pieces of art owned by the federal government.
By May 2025, over 2,100 GSA employees had accepted deferred resignations and the GSA had laid off about 1,000 employees for a total reduction of nearly 25% of its workforce.
Ehikian stated that the workforce reductions were about "moving people from maybe lower productivity roles to a higher productivity in the private sector."