— The winners will be the companies that provide a single source of enterprise truth – Sridhar Ramaswamy, head of Snowflake – a company combining a platform for storing company data with artificial intelligence – said about the technological revolution. “No AI model will help you if there are four sources of this truth,” he added.
Snowflake has the ambition to address this very truth. Although the company established in 2012 in California cannot be compared to the largest tech players in the world (its capitalization is approximately USD 80 billion, while, for example, Microsoft's is as much as USD 3.2 trillion), it has ambitions that go much beyond its current size.
She recently stood out on Wall Street — in the first quarter, earnings per share increased by 21%. higher than market expectations, and its quotations increased by 67% within a month, which made it one of the hits of recent growth. Much of this is due to the agreement signed with Amazon worth USD 6 billion. agreements to use processors from the Bezos giant.
Now, during the annual Snowflake Summit in San Francisco, the company, which serves nearly 14,000 people globally, companies – including Thomson Reuters, Sanofi, Samsung and Nestlé, as well as Allegro – declared the construction of an “agency enterprise”. This is a vision in which autonomous AI systems work directly on managed company data, taking actions without the need to involve programmers at every step.
Snowflake described this vision as an arrangement of four elements: unified enterprise data, AI models, business applications and an “agent control plane” – a center that coordinates decisions and actions.
Snowflake shares with better and better results
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Piotr Swat / Shutterstock
This is the purpose of the two most important products shown in San Francisco: CoWork and CoCo. The first is a personal agent for business workers, the second is a coding agent for developers and data engineers. In its strategy, Snowflake hopes that AI will become the domain not only of IT departments, but of almost all parts of enterprises – from HR, through marketing and administration.
“Companies with a real competitive advantage are those that put the full power of AI into the hands of every employee in the organization,” said Christian Kleinerman, executive vice president of product.
As is often the case in Silicon Valley, in the crucible of relationships, competition intertwines with cooperation. Last year, Sam Altman appeared at the Snowflake Summit, and this year one of the loudest announcements was the deepening of the strategic partnership with Anthropic – the creator of the Claude model, one of the strongest competitors of OpenAI's GPT-4. This attracted the audience's attention even more because Anthropic – like its competitor – is preparing for a stock exchange debut.
Customers can use Anthropic's advanced AI reasoning on their sensitive business data – without having to send it outside Snowflake's secure environment. This is the answer to one of the greatest challenges of the AI era: how to give employees access to the best models without risking data leaks or violating regulations.
Snowflake is not betting solely on Anthropic – the company has also expanded its contract with OpenAI worth $200 million. and works with Google Cloud (Gemini models). The client will decide which AI engine best suits his tasks.
Reuters announces a revolution in information processing
For Snowflake, an important guest during its summit was Caitlin Halferty, head of data and analytics at Thomson Reuters. As she said, the company manages over 37,500 data tables from 350 sources via Snowflake, and over 1,500 employees use the platform every day to make AI-assisted business decisions. “We are accelerating the construction and scaling of AI at Thomson Reuters,” she announced.
Polish accent in business from Silicon Valley
Poland is an important sales market for Snowflake, but also one of the pillars of the company's technological base – in Warsaw there is a large engineering center employing several hundred specialists. The company grew not only organically, but also through acquisitions of Polish technology companies – Polidea, Pragmatists, Applica and TouK. One of the founders of the company was Polish manager Marcin Żukowski.
Grzegorz Kowalczyk, journalist of Business Insider Polska
