Meet Snowflake Intelligence: A Personalized Enterprise Intelligence Agent with Sridhar Ramaswamy

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Snowflake has always been an amazing product company. The original product that Benoit and Theory conceived of 10 plus years ago, was many years ahead of its time. It took the world by storm. And obviously they had the storied IPO, the biggest software IPO at that time. I think what happened was the company was a little slow to reacting to changes from things like machine learning and AI. And that was a little bit of, honestly, the reason why Frank voluntarily pushed for the change, because he felt presciently that we were headed into a time that was just a lot more tumultuous from a product perspective, and he wanted someone that was product first to be in charge of the company.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Our aspiration was for this product to be used by every single employee in the company. So it's not for people who can write SQL. It's not for people that can write SQL. We wanted it to be enough of a daily use product for every single person. There is not a single customer meeting that I'm going to have without quickly checking up on what's the latest with this customer. ... And we place a lot of trust, and we place a lot of emphasis in all our AI products on trust. Meaning, I tell people, we need to think of AI the same way we think about software engineering, which is there's a right and there's a wrong. It cannot be this mode of like YOLO AI, you can get some good answers, some terrible answers, it's your problem. And so we very much emphasize you need an eval for every single new thing that you're going to launch. If you want to change the underlying model, you need to be able to quickly verify that you didn't blow up on the things that you are already doing. And so we want it to be the trustworthy product for every employee, which is actually a new thing for us, by the way, because Snowflake, for pretty much all of its history, has always been used by the data team to slap a dashboard on top, which then gets exposed to end users. This is a very different motion.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: I think the model companies, especially OpenAI, is super interesting because they are in that phase of their growth where they literally, like, they don't think they can not do anything. ... I joke to people that these are like empires that have not met their oceans just yet. And so I think you do have to pay attention to what is likely to be in their immediate path. So for example, I think coding agents are particularly interesting from this perspective, because it is very clear that both Anthropic and OpenAI are going to be laser set on having the best one that there is. ... Google, for example, stopped at information. God knows I spent enough time trying to get into physical things like shopping or airline purchases or hotels. We didn't really succeed because we didn't have core competence really in some fundamental way beyond the world of information. I think it's going to be fascinating to discover what that kind of a boundary is for an OpenAI or an Anthropic. ... I also think a lot about what differentiates us from these model companies? Is this an area that they're likely to be interested in? How do we make sure that we have distance with respect to what we add?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: This is also a time where literally no software company can feel secure about their position in the sun. ... Do you have that orientation of like, we need to continue to earn it? We need to continue to earn it. And if there is anything that all of us have learned, say from the CSPs, it is that they have infinite budgets, they have infinite patience. And unless you innovate and stay ahead, not just be ahead, but stay ahead, you will be intel. I think that's another really useful lesson to remember as a company like Snowflake navigates the current realm. ... I think especially when the technical environment is so fluid, defensibility is built, not strategized. That's correct. It's built every single day. You have to keep moving.