Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I dive into my conversation with Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, where he discusses the shift from AI excitement to delivering measurable business outcomes in 2025.
Highlights
00:09 — One of Ramaswamy’s big points is that there’s plenty of excitement about AI’s potential. But he said 2025 is going to be the year in which the ROI and the quantifiable business outcomes have to be delivered for AI. Now it’s time to make this real.
01:25 — Ramaswamy has kept Snowflake’s growth rate at 30% or higher since he took over as CEO. The big move he made early in his tenure was saying Snowflake was the original Data Cloud company, and he flipped that to the AI Data Cloud. Ramaswamy said we need to turn that from being a great story to one of quantifiable business outcomes for customers.
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02:10 — He said, “How do we get these AI solutions to work at scale, right? How do we make sure they’re reliable? How do we make sure that they’re affordable?” One of the advantages he feels that Snowflake has is its consumption model. It’s not a SaaS model.
03:01 — Customers want to push these AI ideas, especially around areas like the AI Data Cloud. They’re also telling him, ‘Hey, you’ve got to show me the money that I’m going to get from this investment. Show me the value that’s going to come out of this.'”
03:53 — Ramaswamy talked about the huge value in unstructured data and the new possibilities of what’s happening with everything from AI agents to the data. In terms of data interoperability, he talked about how “we’ve got to make it simpler for customers to access their data and generate business value from it . . . We’ve got to allow them to act on their data very, very quickly.”
04:28 — Now, all of this, I think, makes good sense overall for a company in the AI Data Cloud business. I think it’s particularly relevant, though, to hear Ramaswamy — who hasn’t even been in that spot for a year — embracing the notion that customers want to believe in the high potential of the future, but they need to have tangible evidence to move through that into that exciting future.
