Snowflake highlights AI's transformative role in India

The Snowflake World Tour in Mumbai highlighted the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and data on India's enterprise sector.

At the event, Vijayant Rai, Managing Director for India at Snowflake, emphasised the inseparability of AI and data strategies. "There is no AI strategy without a data strategy," said Rai, stressing the necessity of a robust data framework for AI's success. He highlighted the importance of securely accessible data for informed decision-making within enterprises.

Rai outlined Snowflake's approach to empowering organisations to extract valuable data insights, enhance customer experience, and minimise costs across industries such as financial services, retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG), manufacturing, aviation, and logistics. He underscored Snowflake's philosophy of providing a unified platform, stating, "We give you the car, not the parts."

The AI Data Cloud by Snowflake has notably transformed Indian businesses. For instance, Piramal Finance leveraged it to personalise products, resulting in three to four times higher data usage among employees despite saving over INR 1 crore. Razorpay's DataSync service, built on Snowflake's platform, enabled integration and secure utilisation of business and financial data, thereby supporting reporting, fraud monitoring, and creation of new revenue streams.

Some remarkable outcomes for other Indian enterprises include Swiggy, which saw a 3.7 times increase in daily queries and a 20% boost in data processing speed, alongside a reduction in operational costs by 1.8 times. Similarly, Urban Company achieved tenfold improvements in operational efficiency, reducing query response times from over 20 minutes to under two minutes.

Addressing the audience, Prasanna Krishnan, Head of Collaboration and Horizon at Snowflake, noted, "Snowflake is Data Complete." She elaborated on Snowflake's capability to support diverse data types and architecture patterns, highlighting the growing importance of processing unstructured data such as text, audio, and images, especially with advances in AI. Document AI, available on AWS and Azure, exemplifies Snowflake's capabilities in automating processes and enhancing decision-making by deriving insights from unstructured data.

Krishnan further spoke of Snowflake's AI Data Cloud, offering "compute complete" solutions that provide on-demand access to resources. Snowpark Container Services, a managed offering, facilitates deployment and scaling of containerised applications within Snowflake's ecosystem, supported by the Horizon Catalog aiding compliance and security.

The event also explored Snowflake's focus on AI innovation, including investments in Generative AI and initiatives like Cortex AI. Cortex AI, a fully managed service, aims to democratise AI by granting access to leading models for solutions development. Snowflake Arctic provides an enterprise-grade model for complex tasks.

Also featured was the celebration of data-driven innovations with the Snowflake Data Driver Awards, recognising Graas.ai for Data Collaboration.

In his closing remarks, Rai affirmed Snowflake's commitment to empowering enterprises with AI solutions, stating, "The era of enterprise AI in India has begun, and Snowflake is proud to be leading this revolution."