Sridhar Ramaswamy said on stage that that his “AI aha moment” for generative artificial intelligence came when ruminating on an all-too-common online scenario: wading through a long page, line-by-line, to find the one bit of information you need.
“We realized then, in early 2022, that language models were a big breakthrough,” the Snowflake CEO said.
OpenAI was the first to meet that moment in the fall of 2022 with ChatGPT, leaving tech executives to face a head-scratching dilemma: There is no handbook on how to integrate AI into a 30-year old established company, a day-old startup, or anything in between, he said.
In response to a question about whether Snowflake had been in denial about the fast-moving AI wave of the past few years, Ramaswamy noted that timing is everything, and navigating how quickly to jump on new innovations is no easy feat. “Most companies are resource-constrained, so there is scuh a thing as jumping the gun too early,” he added.
Customer feedback on how Snowflake has incorporated AI so far has been good, he said, even for relatively simple tasks. “All of a sudden, our healthcare customers can go through their patient notes in 20 years and see who had a cough in 2020,” he said.
Ramaswamy says broad access to data carries a significant power these days, and that it’s the current trend that excites his customers the most. However, stakeholders are also pushing Snowflake in the direction of cloud interoperability, or as he put it, “the palace where all enterprise data lives.”
When asked whether Snowflake’s recent acquisition of Tabular was a push to compete more closely with rival Databricks, Ramaswamy demured. “I would characterize the acquisition much more as an acceptance that Delta has no future, and that the world of data is really sitting with interoperable data.”
CEREBRAL VALLEY NEW YORK TOOK PLACE ON JUNE 27, 2024, HOSTED BY NEWCOMER & VOLLEY
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