The Era of Enterprise AI Has Arrived: Insights From Snowflake Summit 2024 Day 1

This week, thousands of data and AI professionals gathered in San Francisco for Snowflake Summit 2024, the largest event focused on eliminating complexity and making AI accessible to everyone in the organization. The overarching message was clear — welcome to the age of enterprise AI.

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy kicked off the event by highlighting the company's continued growth and innovation. Snowflake now has 9,800 customers, processes 5 billion queries daily, and its largest customer table contains 200 trillion rows. Over 50% of customers are using Snowpark to bring more extensibility to the platform.

Snowflake's AI Data Cloud Vision  

At the core of Snowflake's vision is the AI Data Cloud. The company has made major investments to expand the types of data it can process, extending governance and performance to external data lakes with open formats like Apache Iceberg. Snowflake has also launched Cortex AI, a fully managed service that puts generative AI into the hands of every user.

To further simplify working with diverse data, Snowflake announced Polaris Catalog, an open catalog implementation for Apache Iceberg that provides interoperability with major cloud providers and data platforms. This exemplifies Snowflake's commitment to building a unified platform that eliminates complexity and integration challenges. As CEO Ramaswamy put it, "Snowflake just works."

The Enterprise AI Imperative

Snowflake has assembled a world-class AI research team with hundreds of engineers across key disciplines like training systems, multi-modality, open source LLMs, NLP, search, and efficiency. This investment is driven by the number one question Ramaswamy hears from customers: How can Snowflake help us with AI?

The promise of enterprise AI is to enable everyone in an organization to talk to data in natural language and get insights to drive the business forward. But achieving this requires addressing key challenges around harnessing data while protecting security, finding skilled talent, and managing costs. Snowflake aims to make enterprise AI easy, efficient, and trusted.

The company has already demonstrated strong ROI, helping customers like Pfizer reduce their data platform costs by 57%. Partners are also building innovative AI solutions on Snowflake. For example, Coda Brain, entering private preview, allows any business user to ask questions about structured and unstructured enterprise data. Deloitte, Accenture, and EY showcased applications for smart manufacturing, clinical study acceleration, and insurance insights.

Partnerships Accelerate Enterprise AI

A major highlight of the keynote was an appearance by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Snowflake and NVIDIA are collaborating to integrate NVIDIA AI Enterprise software into Cortex AI, enabling organizations to build customized AI solutions that maximize investments while keeping data secure.

NVIDIA's NeMo Retriever and Triton Inference Server will be offered in Cortex AI, and NVIDIA NIM inference microservices can be deployed directly within Snowflake via Snowpark Container Services. This allows developers across skill levels to efficiently create AI-powered applications using their enterprise data.

The collaboration is already driving results. Siemens, for instance, used Cortex AI and NVIDIA technology to make 700,000 pages of engineering documents searchable, leading to huge productivity gains. Huang noted that AI innovation is moving faster than ever, with the potential to double every six months. As companies capture data and learnings from generative AI, it creates a flywheel effect that will further accelerate progress.

Voices From the CDO Roundtable

The power of data and AI was further emphasized in a roundtable with Chief Data Officers from J.P. Morgan Chase, NYC Health + Hospitals, Ericsson, and Booking.com. The CDOs discussed how their role has evolved to drive business value through data.

Anu Jain from J.P. Morgan Chase highlighted the importance of hyper-personalization in financial services. NYC Health + Hospital's Shahran Haider explained how data sharing improves care for underserved populations. Caitlin Halferty from Ericsson described a digital twin initiative that's increasing efficiency and safety. Booking.com CDO Thomas Davey discussed using ML and AI to create frictionless travel experiences at scale.

The CDOs agreed that focused, value-aligned data and AI initiatives are critical for success. Close partnerships between business and technical teams, along with strong data governance, are also key factors.

Conclusion

The first day of Snowflake Summit painted an exciting picture of the present and future of enterprise AI. With its unified, governed platform and deep partnerships, Snowflake aims to make every organization a data and AI powerhouse.

For developers and architects, the expanding opportunities are clear. You can now leverage technologies like Cortex AI, Snowpark, and NVIDIA integrations to efficiently build intelligent applications, with strong security and cost control. An extensive partner ecosystem provides solution accelerators across industries and use cases.

As Ramaswamy stated, the era of enterprise AI is here. It will be fascinating to see how organizations harness these capabilities to drive innovation and transformation in the coming years. One thing is certain — those that successfully democratize AI stand to gain a significant competitive edge. The Snowflake Summit is just the beginning of this exciting journey.