Snowflake's Data Cloud Summit 2024: AI Integration and Data Management Innovations

Driving innovation with Snowflake AI integration - SiliconANGLE

Customer-centric AI: How Snowflake and Slalom are shaping the future of AI The technology landscape is rapidly evolving, with innovative companies such as Snowflake Inc. leading the charge in artificial intelligence integration and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Central to these advancements are the transformative roles of artificial intelligence, strategic partnerships and customer-centric approaches that drive significant value and competitive advantage, according to Mukesh Kumar (pictured, right), president of global technology at Slalom. "I believe Slalom is the most customer-obsessed company on the planet," he said. "We don't hire people that have the desire to work on legacy COBOL code or things that are 25 years past. What we really look for is how we can still support them through, say, developing partnerships with companies that try to do that type of work." Kumar and Amy Hirst-Kodl (left), head of GSI and Americas alliances at Snowflake, spoke with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante at Data Cloud Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed the transformative impact of AI, Snowflake AI integration and strategic partnerships in driving business innovation and customer-centric solutions. (* Disclosure below.) Slalom and Snowflake work together to test and improve products, with a focus on customer feedback and a shared value of relentless focus on teams, according to Hirst-Kodl. "I think it was really clear with what Mukesh said that they've always taken an AI-first approach," Hrist-Kodl said. "We've seen an incredible amount of investment that they're making with us around helping clients advance in their journey with Snowflake and really taking advantage of the data as a platform and being able to build the house of AI on top. We are actually investing, co-investing in some solutions that they're building." Clients prioritize use cases for AI adoption with a focus on ROI, security and governance, partnering with Snowflake and Slalom to navigate risks and drive real business value and human impact, Kumar explained. "Snowflake as a platform is easy, efficient and trusted; it's really going to be a platform that customers can really build the house of AI on top of," Kumar said. "We hear there's risk and maybe some hesitation at times ... but I think Snowflake's the platform to do it with because of our inherent security and governance models and the trusted nature of our platform that customers have relied on for years in the data space that they can now rely on in the AI space." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE Research's coverage of Data Cloud Summit:

Fivetran and Snowflake partner to simplify data management for users - SiliconANGLE

Breaking data silos: Fivetran and Snowflake partner for seamless AI integration Data management is the bedrock of the artificial intelligence era, so Fivetran Inc. and Snowflake Inc. are partnering to help customers bring their data together by making Fivetran a native application on the Snowflake Marketplace. Fivetran and Snowflake have a longstanding collaboration, with Fivetran helping deliver data into Snowflake's cloud platform. The upcoming release of Polaris will allow customers to access Iceberg data from Fivetran. "Data is at the center, and customers' enterprise data sits in a variety of places," said Prasanna Krishnan (pictured right), senior director of collaboration and Horizon at Snowflake. "We and Fivetran are aligned on our vision of enabling you to break down silos between data, bringing together all your data. This is where we partnered with Fivetran to help bring that data into Snowflake so that it's now available for you to be able to unlock value through AI and apps." Krishnan and George Fraser (left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Fivetran, spoke with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante at Data Cloud Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed data management and the ongoing work to break down barriers between data and the possible impact of AI. (* Disclosure below.) Being able to leverage Fivetran as a native application on Snowflake will give organizations further governance benefits on their data. It will also save them the time-consuming process of re-validating their environment for data coming through Fivetran, according to Fraser. "There are so many weird things that all these different data sources do, you cannot believe it," he said. "The real value Fivetran provides is all the people working madly behind the scenes to map out and work around all these funny things that all these data sources do so that you just get a mirror image of your data in Snowflake as though it was born there." Snowflake's Polaris, an open source Iceberg catalog, works with Horizon, a built-in discovery and governance layer, over both data in Snowflake's native format and Iceberg data, delivered by Fivetran. This gives businesses the freedom to store their data wherever they want, and potentially saves on costs, Krishnan explained. "What native applications do is really enable you to bring the application to the data, to the customer's security and governance perimeter," she said. "We're enabling customers to run Fivetran's logic as a native application, within the security and governance perimeter of their Snowflake account, which enables them to speed up procurement, and ... giv[es] them the option to use the capacity dollars that they've already committed with Snowflake to be able to pay for the application." Of course, AI could speed up this process as well, and it is already being implemented, according to Krishnan and Fraser. However, there is still a lot of work for engineers and developers at Fivetran and Snowflake to ensure that the data remains sound. "When we write a new connector at Fivetran, the scaffold is actually written by a language model, but there always has to be a lot of developer work to go and map out all of the very arbitrary rules that you need to get right in order to correctly replicate data," Fraser said. "It's easy to replicate data; it's hard to correctly replicate data. So, we haven't seen it turn things upside down for us yet, but we certainly are focused on it and trying to figure out how [AI will] change the data replication business." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE Research's coverage of Data Cloud Summit:

The AI/Data Cloud combo at Salesforce unpacked - SiliconANGLE

Salesforce powers new AI use cases with Data Cloud and integrated capabilities The enterprise has transcended speculating on artificial intelligence and has moved into implementation. In doing so, companies have to figure out the combination of ancillary technologies that, when placed strategically with AI, can drive relevant use cases and business outcomes. Salesforce Inc. is leveraging a powerful trio -- its Data Cloud, automation and AI -- to deliver what it considers cutting-edge transformative outcomes for organizations. "AI has such wonderful capability today from predictive to generative, [but] it's not new to Salesforce," said Param Kahlon, executive vice president and general manager at Salesforce. "Salesforce has been doing predictive AI for almost 10 years now. But what is great is that generative AI now gives the ability to process these large language models on large amounts of unstructured, semi-structured content to generate great content that can be used by salespeople to send relevant emails and marketing people to create personalized landing pages." Kahlon spoke with theCUBE Research Senior Analyst George Gilbert during a recent "The Road to Intelligent Data Apps" podcast series. They discussed how Salesforce is revolutionizing how businesses operate in the digital age by harnessing the power of AI-driven insights, contextualizing data with the company's Data Cloud and enabling real-time actions. In today's business environment, intelligence is the cornerstone of success. Salesforce's AI platform empowers companies with predictive and generative AI capabilities, enabling them to make insightful decisions and craft personalized experiences for their customers. The playing field has expanded, allowing businesses to process vast amounts of unstructured data and generate compelling content. "For this AI to be meaningful and for companies to harness the full value of AI, you want to make sure that you're grounding the data that's being used to generate those predictions with some things that are relevant to the current business process, to the current transaction, to the current context of interaction you're happening with the customer," Kahlon said. For that contextualization to be possible, there needs to be a data cloud. Acting as the AI foundation, Salesforce's Data Cloud platform takes existing data models and enriches them with relevant contextual data tailored to the specific needs of each business and their ongoing interactions with customers. "When we talk to our large customers, they all tell us that AI is really important for them," Kahlon said. "That is something that they want to drive, but they're also saying that the data for them is spread out across the enterprise. Some of them tell us that they have more than 900 different business systems in which data is stored, and they want the ability to bring that data together in a seamless way so it can be processed by AI through Data Cloud." The combination of AI and Data Cloud generates actionable insights, but those insights alone aren't enough. Businesses need to act swiftly on these predictions, driving real-time actions to capitalize on opportunities. This is where integration and automation come into play, according to Kahlon. "[Customers are] essentially telling us that data is spread across the enterprise and they want the data in real time to be available to customers," he said. "With MuleSoft and Salesforce integration capabilities, we've focused on the real-time nature of making sure that you can take real-time business transactions in the context of the process that is happening, and that's what's differentiated in our approach to making sure that we can collect the data in real time and make actions happen in real time." Integration is the glue that brings together data from various sources, allowing AI to derive meaningful insights. Salesforce's integration capabilities, powered by MuleSoft, focus on real-time data processing, ensuring that businesses can act on insights as they occur. This low-latency approach enables not only Salesforce applications, but also other third-party applications to contribute to the data ecosystem, Kahlon explained. "We've got a very large North American airline that has built their entire customer experience, from booking an airline ticket to checking into your flight and ordering special meals for your flight, all of that on an API-based platform -- and we're able to process that scale of transactions," he said. "As you get into AI, all of that becomes extremely relevant to drive that real-time throughput, and that's where our customers are finding value in our technology." Here's theCUBE's complete video interview with Param Kahlon: