Snowflake heralds AI transformation for Indian enterprises

Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, underscored its dedication to transforming the Indian enterprise sector at the Snowflake World Tour held in Delhi.

The event, which occurred on 30 August 2024, featured a keynote address delivering significant insights from Sanjay Deshmukh, Senior Regional Vice President of ASEAN and India, and Vijayant Rai, Managing Director, India of Snowflake. They placed a spotlight on the vital convergence of data and AI, articulating the company's objective to equip businesses in India with advanced data strategies and AI capabilities.

The keynote detailed Snowflake's endeavours in the Era of Enterprise AI, emphasising efforts to render AI straightforward, efficient, and trustworthy. The company's unified platform strives to simplify complexities and bolster cost-efficiency, according to the philosophy of delivering a complete solution. "We give you the car, not the parts," the officials stated, indicating that Snowflake's AI Data Cloud extends benefits beyond the IT department, enhancing the entire enterprise.

Vijayant Rai stressed the criticality of accurate data management for successful AI implementations. "There is no AI strategy without a data strategy," Rai affirmed. He highlighted ongoing initiatives to create a "Data-Enabled Bharat" in sectors including BFSI, aviation, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, CPG, logistics, and pharmaceuticals. Rai cited success stories from prominent Indian corporations such as Urban Company, which experienced a tenfold boost in operational efficiency; Swiggy, which recorded a 3.7x rise in daily queries, 20% faster processing, and a 1.8x reduction in costs; and Shiprocket, which observed a drastic reduction in data processing time, facilitating quicker data-driven decision-making.

Sanjay Deshmukh highlighted Snowflake's mission to offer the most efficient data and AI platform worldwide, mentioning that the AI Data Cloud currently supports over 10,000 customers and more than 10,000 partners using it to deliver industry solutions. He pointed out the platform's extensive scale, managing over 5 billion jobs daily with numerous stable edges between clients. Snowflake continues investing in security and governance enhancements, introducing innovations like Snowflake Horizon, a governance solution. Deshmukh detailed two critical components of Snowflake's AI capabilities: an AI-powered data platform for intelligent ingestion, governance, and optimisation of data workflows, and a data-powered AI platform enabling the development of sophisticated AI products using enterprise data.

Snowflake's ongoing commitment to being "Data Complete" was highlighted through its rapid progress in GenAI and the new fully managed AI service, Cortex AI. This service integrates smoothly with Snowflake's platform, facilitating the development of AI applications with essential security, trust, and governance. The company's latest feature, Polaris Catalog, an open-source catalog for Iceberg data compatible with AWS, GCP, or Azure, permits customers to use multiple engines on the same data copy without adhering strictly to one catalog. Enterprises like Bayer, Zoom, and Sigma were cited as examples of organisations utilising Snowflake to enhance productivity and customer experiences with AI-driven applications.

Additionally, a notable highlight of the event was the presentation of the Snowflake Data Driver Award to Sunil Kumar, CTO at Shiprocket, who was honoured as the Data Executive of the Year for his outstanding leadership and innovation in leveraging data to propel business success.

Rai concluded by underscoring the increasing integration of data and AI realms, stating, "We at Snowflake are on a mission to make data work for enterprises and to give them easy, efficient, and trusted Enterprise AI."