Snowflake Mounts Full-Court Press to Get Employees Using AI

When Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy and CFO Brian Robins face Wall Street analysts on quarterly earnings calls nowadays, they’re armed with material from an internally developed AI agent. The agent tells the two executives the questions they’re expecting the analysts to ask and provides suggested answers.

The agent prepares that material in minutes, automating a process that used to take Snowflake staffers several weeks, according to Anahita Tafvizi, the company’s chief data and AI officer. And it’s one of the ways Snowflake employees are using AI to make them more productive. And by themselves getting better at using AI, Snowflake is getting better at selling AI to its customers, according to a current Snowflake salesperson. 

Tafvizi's team works with multiple Snowflake business units, such as sales and marketing, finance and human resources, to develop AI agents that automate manual work. They do this using Snowflake’s two main AI products: an AI coding agent called Cortex Code and an agent for querying data in Snowflake and third-party applications, called Snowflake CoWork. 

Aside from the agent coming up with analyst questions, another agent developed for Robins tracks Snowflake customers that are deviating from their projected levels of spending—both positively and negatively. It analyzes the accounts to figure out why, and drafts emails with sets of questions for the salespeople handling the accounts. “All Brian has to do is review the emails and send them,” she said.