Channel Buzz

Empowering Data-Enabled Bharat with Snowflake AI Data Cloud

by VARINDIA 2024-08-31

Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, showcased its commitment to revolutionizing the Indian enterprise landscape at the Snowflake World Tour in Delhi on 30 August 2024. The keynote address featured insights from Sanjay Deshmukh, Senior Regional Vice President of ASEAN and India, and Vijayant Rai, Managing Director, India of Snowflake. They emphasized the crucial intersection of data and AI, highlighting the company’s mission to empower businesses across India with cutting-edge data strategies and AI capabilities. Key messages from the event included Snowflake's pioneering efforts in the Era of Enterprise AI, focusing on making AI easy, efficient, and trusted. Snowflake offers a unified platform that simplifies complexity and enhances cost-efficiency, embodying the philosophy of providing a complete solution—"We give you the car, not the parts." This approach ensures that Snowflake isn’t just for IT; the AI Data Cloud illuminates every corner of the enterprise.

Vijayant Rai delivered a compelling address, underlining the critical importance of getting data right to ensure successful AI implementations. "There is no AI strategy without a data strategy," Rai asserted. He highlighted Snowflake’s ongoing efforts to create a "Data-Enabled Bharat" across key sectors such as BFSI, aviation, telecommunications, manufacturing, Retail, CPG, Logistics and pharmaceuticals. He shared success stories from leading Indian companies like Urban Company, which has seen a tenfold improvement in operational efficiency through its collaboration with Snowflake; Swiggy, a leading food delivery service, which reported a 3.7x increase in daily queries, 20% faster processing, and a 1.8x reduction in costs; and Shiprocket, an e-commerce enablement platform, has experienced a reduced data processing time from days to minutes to enable faster access to data to allow businesses to make data-driven decisions quickly. significantly.

Sanjay Deshmukh underscored Snowflake's mission to deliver the most efficient data and AI platform available, noting that the AI Data Cloud globally now supports over 10,000 customers and more than 10,000 partners, who utilize it to deliver industry solutions. He also spoke about the platform's massive scale, handling over 19.5 billion jobs daily with thousands of stable edges between customers. Snowflake is continuously investing in security and governance improvements, with innovations such as Snowflake Horizon, a governance solution. Sanjay outlined two key aspects of Snowflake’s AI capabilities: an AI-powered Data Platform that intelligently ingests, governs, and optimizes data workflows, and a Data-powered AI platform that enables the development of advanced AI products using enterprise data.

Snowflake's commitment to being "Data Complete," continues with its rapid advancements in GenAI and its new fully managed AI service Cortex AI. This service integrates seamlessly with Snowflake’s platform, making it easier to build AI applications with all the necessary security, trust, and governance. Snowflake’s latest capability Polaris Catalog, an open-source catalog for Iceberg data, which can be used across AWS, GCP, or Azure, allows customers to use multiple engines on the same copy of data without being locked into a single catalog. Bayer, Zoom, and Sigma, are examples of how enterprises are using Snowflake to enhance productivity and customer experiences through AI-driven applications.

A key highlight of the event was the recognition of the Snowflake Data Driver Award to Sunil Kumar, CTO at Shiprocket, who was recognized as the Data Executive of the Year for his exemplary leadership and innovation in leveraging data to drive business success.

Rai concluded by emphasising the growing convergence of the worlds of data and AI, stating, "We at Snowflake are on a mission to make data work for enterprises and to give them easy, efficient, and trusted Enterprise AI."