Dive Brief:
- Sridhar Ramaswamy took over as Snowflake's CEO Wednesday, succeeding Frank Slootman who announced his retirement. Slootman, who was named CEO in 2019, will remain as board chair, Snowflake said in the announcement.
- Ramaswamy became SVP of AI in May when Snowflake acquired Neeva, the AI search engine startup he co-founded after a 15-year career at Google.
- The leadership change punctuates an AI-fueled data services boom for Snowflake, which launched AI application builder Cortex in November. “With the onslaught of generative AI, Snowflake needs a hard-driving technologist to navigate the challenges the new world represents,” Slootman said during the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call Wednesday
Dive Insight:
Data-hungry LLMs gave cloud storage a welcome boost on the heels of an optimization push last year. Snowflake reaped the rewards.
Product revenue grew 33% year over year to $738.1 million during the three-month period ending Jan 31. The company closed out the fiscal year with nearly $2.7 billion in product revenue, a 38% increase year over year.
The gains were grounded in enterprise data needs.
“There's no AI strategy without a data strategy,” Ramaswamy said Wednesday. “This has opened a massive opportunity for Snowflake.”
Ramaswamy led the launch of Cortex, which the company expects to make generally available in time for its Data Cloud Summit in June.
Snowflake’s AI/ML container services, currently in AWS public preview, is also due for full release in June, along with the Document AI natural language data extraction solution and an AI-enabled SQL copilot tool, EVP of Product Christian Kleinerman confirmed during the call.
“Document AI is about extracting structured information from unstructured documents like PDFs that every enterprise has boatloads of,” Ramaswamy said.
The copilot tool uses natural language processing to simplify database queries.
“The big unlock is being able to get at the structured data that is in Snowflake and have that be accessed by many, many more people,” said Ramaswamy.
As the company ramps up its AI production line, it plans to hire an additional 1,000 employees and pour approximately $50 million into GPU hardware, CFO Mike Scarpelli said.
“A lot of our expensive hiring is in the R&D area and it will continue to be more in the AI/ML space,” Scarpelli said, adding “these engineers are very expensive.”
