Welcome to this exclusive interview with Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, as part of the Acceleration Economy Cloud Wars Top 10 CEO Outlook 2024 series. When Slootman met with Bob Evans, he addressed topics including the business benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), Snowflake’s value to customers, and AI’s impact in areas including education.
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Highlights
The Journey of AI (01:15)
With AI, there’s a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out), and people are feeling pressure to show they’re working on it and are making progress. It’s a classic hype cycle. People are incredibly infatuated with the potential and the possibilities. But now, the reality is that this is a journey. And part of that journey is getting one’s data estate in order, which is obviously where Snowflake’s been from day one. There’s no AI strategy without enabling data strategy to support it.
AI’s Economic Impact (03:18)
Slootman says customers, including their CEOs want to redefine and reset the economics of key functions and parts of this business such as enterprise contact centers while enhancing notoriously bad service experiences. People see an opportunity with AI to simplify and eliminate layers of staffing. The levels of intelligence that are being achieved today are going to redefine economics and service experiences in education, healthcare, and other areas.
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Empowering Business (07:48)
Snowflake’s clients want to mobilize their data. With phenomena like pandemics, spiking inflation, wars, and disintermediating markets, customers must learn to rely on data to power business models and the experiences they’re providing. Data is poking people from every direction. The question becomes, how savvy and equipped are clients to go on that data journey? Some people are farther along than others, but everybody has to invest.
Application Development (09:39)
Last year, Slootman commented that Snowflake has the opportunity to help redefine the mindset around application development. Now, he considers that the core of Snowflake’s strategy. The majority of consumption of Snowflake will be coming from applications, Slootman notes. The way applications will be built will be very different from the past, especially given how data architectures are developing. Developing apps in the data cloud requires redefining the stack completely from top to bottom.
Differentiating with Data Clouds (11:54)
Snowflake differentiates itself from competitors in terms of customer outcomes with its data cloud. Building a data cloud is more than just “creating a landfill of files and calling it a day.” Customers want to be able to have everything in one place. “They’re optimized. They’re organized. They’re curated.”
Data Sharing and Modernizing (13:34)
Data sharing has changed people’s perspectives on what data operations really are, he notes. Business relationships are a core reason why data sharing is so important, as people come together for a shared business purpose. Finance and supply chain management are other areas where data sharing is critical.
Snowflake works with Blue Yonder, a company dedicated to supply chain management. It replatformed with Snowflake to enable better data-sharing capabilities. Before working with Snowflake, Blue Yonder wasn’t fully modernized. It has a huge presence with retailers and manufacturers. Now, it can bring these benefits and capabilities to its business relationships. In addition to finance and supply chain, healthcare is also an area that Slootman identifies as having strong opportunity to modernize. Especially with moving medical records around, the healthcare industry will benefit from modern technologies, such as AI.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) (18:20)
Slootman says it’s “really terrible” that a chief legal officer needs to know about LLMs (in response to a question on how much GenAI has come into focus within the C-Suite). “We have to abstract the technology, let them engage and interact at a level that makes sense to them. They shouldn’t have to step into our world to derive the benefits.” Because GenAI enables the use of natural language, it is the “epitome” of abstraction, he notes, fully bridging the divide between man and machine.
GenAI Impact on Customers, Education (20:40)
Slootman expects customers will go to places Snowflake and other vendors couldn’t have dreamed of. The progression of platforms has been a hard, painful slog characterized by arcane systems and occasional steps backward. The development of search was “extraordinary” and now it’s impossible to imagine how AI will transform education and how well people will be able to learn. Since ChatGPT will become ubiquitous, Slootman says he doesn’t see any reason to exclude it from education.
