Cloud Wars
  • Home
  • Top 10
  • CW Minute
  • CW Podcast
  • Categories
    • AI and Copilots
    • Innovation & Leadership
    • Cybersecurity
    • Data
  • Member Resources
    • Cloud Wars AI Agent
    • Digital Summits
    • Guidebooks
    • Reports
  • About Us
    • Our Story
    • Tech Analysts
    • Marketing Services
  • Summit NA
  • Dynamics Communities
  • Ask Copilot
Twitter Instagram
  • Summit NA
  • Dynamics Communities
  • AI Copilot Summit NA
  • Ask Cloud Wars
Twitter LinkedIn
Cloud Wars
  • Home
  • Top 10
  • CW Minute
  • CW Podcast
  • Categories
    • AI and CopilotsWelcome to the Acceleration Economy AI Index, a weekly segment where we cover the most important recent news in AI innovation, funding, and solutions in under 10 minutes. Our goal is to get you up to speed – the same speed AI innovation is taking place nowadays – and prepare you for that upcoming customer call, board meeting, or conversation with your colleague.
    • Innovation & Leadership
    • CybersecurityThe practice of defending computers, servers, mobile devices, electronic systems, networks, and data from malicious attacks.
    • Data
  • Member Resources
    • Cloud Wars AI Agent
    • Digital Summits
    • Guidebooks
    • Reports
  • About Us
    • Our Story
    • Tech Analysts
    • Marketing Services
    • Login / Register
Cloud Wars
    • Login / Register
Home » Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman: ‘AI’ and ‘Budget’ Never in Same Sentence
Cloud

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman: ‘AI’ and ‘Budget’ Never in Same Sentence

Bob EvansBy Bob EvansDecember 5, 2023Updated:December 5, 20235 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email
Snowflake
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email

Customer demand for artificial intelligence (AI) has reached such an exuberant level that budgetary considerations are swept aside when the subject turns to AI, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman said last week.

Asked during the company’s Q3 earnings call about the level of interest in AI across the C-suite, Slootman offered up one of his classic perspectives on this crazy market: “I don’t even hear the words ‘AI’ and ‘budget’ in the same sentence. In other words, they’re going to make resources available to enable it. What, if anything, is holding it back is really understanding exactly how to do it.”

That striking comment came as Snowflake released strong fiscal-Q3 results, including a 34% jump in product revenue to $698.5 million plus a 23% increase in remaining performance obligation (RPO) to $3.7 billion.

Outlining that impressive Q3 performance, Slootman said AI is not only dominating almost every customer conversation but is also causing enterprise leaders to think long and hard about how to modernize their data estates to be able to handle the relentless generative AI (GenAI) phenomenon.

Near the top of his prepared remarks, Slootman framed the customer mindset this way:

“Generative AI is at the forefront of customer conversations, which in turn drives renewed emphasis on data strategy in preparation of these new technologies. We’ve said it many times: there’s no AI strategy without a data strategy. The intelligence we’re all aiming for resides in the data, hence the quality of that underpinning is critical.”

In that context, the comment from Slootman noted above about how that passionate desire for AI capabilities must be matched with the necessary expertise to turn that desire into reality — “What, if anything, is holding it back is really understanding exactly how to do it” — is a theme he pointedly returned to later in the call.

“In our conversations with customers, I always tell them this: Your problem is no longer the technology; your problem is your imagination and your budget, right? Not that those are easy things to overcome, but the technology is not holding us back anymore; it’s our ability to harness that technology,” Slootman said.

“And then, of course, you have to pay for it as well.”

As he said, not easy things to overcome.

Featured - Lookout CASB
The Role of CASB with DLP:
Unlocking Hybrid Work’s Potential Safely

When the Levee Breaks: The Move from On-Prem to the Cloud

Slootman outlined a number of ways in which Snowflake is addressing that yawning gap between what customers so desperately want — AI’s power — and their ability to methodically and intelligently unleash that power, and I’ll get to those in a later piece.

But as is the case across so many fronts in the Cloud Wars, the big obstacle — the big hill that still needs to be taken — is convincing tens of thousands of enterprises that the time has come to begin moving aggressively away from on-prem and into the cloud or else all those AI dreams will remain just that: dreams.

“That legacy replatforming is sort of the hard core of our business,” Slootman said during the Q&A portion of the earnings call.

“And almost surprisingly, there is just an enormous amount of workloads still sitting on-premise that is still waiting to get migrated to the cloud. So, I expect this to continue for a very long period of time. But what makes it very important is that once you get those data estates into the cloud, our new architectures and our new technologies are now enabling opportunities that people haven’t had before,” he said.

“So it’s not just like, ‘OK, we’re going to be doing in the cloud what we used to be doing on-premise.’ And that’s the foundation of the business, and it is definitely foundational that the opportunity is really what grows from that. That’s been the Snowflake story from day one because of what’s now possible. We don’t have the capacity constraints, so people can run unlimited numbers of workloads. So with all the new technologies in terms of programmability and AI and ML, the sky’s the limit.”

But only if business leaders first dig in and understand that becoming AI-powered requires more than flipping a switch or wishing and hoping.

“So you’ll see customers doing a lot of benchmark and compare-and-contrast experimentation and testing and all these kinds of things, and they’re going to go through many many iterations of that,” Slootman said.

“And we will as well. And I think the field will become very proliferated with large foundational models and many, many, many sub-sector specialized models that are very, very deep but also very very narrow in purpose. So it’s going to become an enormous field.”

Final Thought

I was heartened to hear Slootman say that business leaders are looking at this generational opportunity to go beyond the idea of simply doing what they’ve done in the past a little bit more efficiently. In fact, he said, they’re requiring that technology partners like Snowflake help them achieve a “reset of economics.”

“And I will tell you that when you talk to the C-suite in large enterprises, people are looking for a reset of economics like, for example, in contact centers, in pricing optimizations, and in supply-chain management. I mean, these are really very, very big-impact opportunities. These are not sort of marginal incremental things that have their attention.

“Data has always had that promise, but it’s really on steroids now under the influence of the newer technologies that we’re all excited about.”

So now it’s time to transform that excitement into reality.


Discover how AI has created a new ecosystem of partnerships with a fresh spirit of customer-centric cocreation and a renewed focus on reimagining what is possible. The Acceleration Economy AI Ecosystem Course is available on demand.

Interested in Snowflake?

Schedule a discovery meeting to see if we can help achieve your goals

Connect With Us

Book a Demo

ai Artificial Intelligence C-Suite Cloud Wars Cloud Wars Archive featured Snowflake
Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email
Founderuser

Bob Evans

Founder
Cloud Wars

Areas of Expertise
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Digital Business
  • Innovation
  • Leadership
  • LinkedIn

Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans actively analyzes the Cloud and AI categories through video reports, in-depth analyses, and interviews with the Cloud and AI market’s leaders and innovators. He’s also the creator of the Cloud Wars Top 10, a ranking and ongoing analysis of the world's most influential tech companies driving digital business and the digital economy. Bob is recognized as a world-class strategic communicator focused on emerging business strategy, disruptive innovation, and forward-looking leadership.

  Contact Bob Evans ...

Related Posts

Ajay Patel Talks AI Strategy and Enterprise Adoption Trends | Cloud Wars Live

July 2, 2025

Slack API Terms Update Restricts Data Exports and LLM Usage

July 2, 2025

Google Cloud Still World’s Hottest Cloud and AI Vendor; Oracle #2, SAP #3

July 1, 2025

SignUp Software Insights on Optimizing Dynamics 365 With ISV Partnerships

July 1, 2025
Add A Comment

Comments are closed.

Recent Posts
  • Ajay Patel Talks AI Strategy and Enterprise Adoption Trends | Cloud Wars Live
  • Slack API Terms Update Restricts Data Exports and LLM Usage
  • Google Cloud Still World’s Hottest Cloud and AI Vendor; Oracle #2, SAP #3
  • SignUp Software Insights on Optimizing Dynamics 365 With ISV Partnerships
  • Hottest Cloud Vendors: Google Cloud Still #1, But Oracle, SAP Closing In

  • Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent
  • Tech Guidebooks
  • Industry Reports
  • Newsletters

Join Today

Most Popular Guidebooks

Accelerating GenAI Impact: From POC to Production Success

November 1, 2024

ExFlow from SignUp Software: Streamlining Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations and Business Central with AP Automation

September 10, 2024

Delivering on the Promise of Multicloud | How to Realize Multicloud’s Full Potential While Addressing Challenges

July 19, 2024

Zero Trust Network Access | A CISO Guidebook

February 1, 2024

Advertisement
Cloud Wars
Twitter LinkedIn
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Get In Touch
  • Marketing Services
  • Do not sell my information
© 2025 Cloud Wars.

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

  • Login
Forgot Password?
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.

Notifications