DATA & DATA ANALYTICS
Snowflake’ s marketplace strategy extends this principle to applications. Rather than building every possible data tool, the company enables specialists to create applications that run within its security framework.
“ Think about hospitals,” Benoit explains.“ You develop an application that can detect disease on scans, and it can be used by many hospitals. You need to bring this application to the scans, you want the application to be installed securely, within their governance.”
Skills evolution and platform maturity Data quality remains a customer responsibility, though Snowflake provides tools for monitoring and validation.
“ Quality is a little bit tricky,” Benoit acknowledges.“ Quality is something customers have to really put in their pipeline. It’ s a little bit like coding: you need to write unit tests for your code.”
Data operations increasingly resemble software development. Both require testing, version control and quality assurance processes. Snowflake provides the infrastructure, but customers must implement the practices.
“ Making something simple was really hard, and making something simple takes time,” he says.“ Either when you say simple, it’ s because the complexity has been internalised inside the platform.”
This approach requires more upfront investment but reduces ongoing customer effort. Snowflake absorbs the complexity of managing thousands of
“Snowflake’ s had really good governance for years. Now, we’ re just going to put agents right on top of that”
BENOIT DAGEVILLE CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF PRODUCTS, SNOWFLAKE
servers, multiple AI models and security policies so customers can focus on their specific business problems.
The company now develops specialised AI agents for particular use cases. Data scientists can automate model development pipelines. Finance teams can query spending patterns across departments. Marketing analysts can compare campaign performance without writing SQL.
“ I predict by next year, there’ s going to be a dozen or so types of these specialised agents,” Jeff says.“ Whether you want to understand your Snowflake bill or you want to help build a pipeline, or whatever you’ re doing, just have more agents helping with more and more pieces.”
Customer adoption follows predictable patterns. Organisations start with simple queries and gradually tackle more complex analysis as confidence builds.
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