When I need to look at Sales data, I don’t want to be writing SQL.
It’s a sentiment that most of us can presumably get behind, vocalized by Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of data analytics platform provider Snowflake at this week’s Summit event in San Francisco. It’s also one that ties in to his wider thesis – and a prevailing theme of the conference – namely:
What we are beginning to see is AI changing the very nature of information work.
And that’s a prediction that impacts on everyone as he goes on:
I think the future of work is very much all of us, you and me included, living in a new kind of environment. Just like all of us got used to living in a browser for most of our work life or using our phones 24/7, what we see happening very, very clearly is that there is a new category, the agentic control plane, and that is going to be at the center of how work gets done.
This will lead to changes for all sorts of people in the Snowflake community, according to Ramaswamy:
For an analyst, somebody that wrote SQL for a living, things are just very different. They go from effectively creating dashboards or writing one-off sequels to creating what looks closer to software within Snowflake. For example, we deployed skill packs that were specialized to different departments within Snowflake in a matter of like 4 weeks, and we’ve been continuously iterating on them, using these kind of agent products [that are] so super, super intuitive for all of the non-technical folks at Snowflake.
The rise of agentic systems also impacts on the more technical side of the business, he adds:
For our Data Scientists and our Data Engineers, they now think in terms of how do you automate creating an entire pipeline. For them, even adding a single column in a table used to be like this endlessly tedious work of making stuff propagate across hundreds of files manually with people looking it over. That stuff is getting automated…In fact, one of the idioms that we are trying to teach our software engineers at Snowflake is that they really need to be thinking of their work as being a tech lead of agents rather than an individual contributor that writes code one line at a time. It’s a huge, huge mentality shift.
It’s also one that Ramaswamy previewed some time back:
I talked last year about how it was really, really critical that not just software engineers, but all of the solution engineers within our team. These are the pre-Sales folks that show the art of the possible with our customers that help them get projects done. I talked last year about how it was really important that they become AI-native because they could just get more things done faster.
So no-one can say they weren’t given warning of what was to come:
Software engineering, as I said, is undergoing a complete revolution. Anyone that thinks that software engineering is about white coding is firmly stuck in early 2025. The world is producing a set of rocket scientists that are way smarter, can get way more done, than the ordinary software engineer or even the excellent software engineer could do last year.
But while that all sounds positive and aspirational, there are a lot of people who will find re-inventing how they work to be painful, he admits:
People are happy sort of doing their own specialization. It’s awkward to suddenly say, ‘You’re responsible for the whole and you need to iterate a lot faster’…It’s often an awkward conversation as I routinely boil it down to what’s the top decile doing, even within a population that, on average, clearly is doing better. And we press very, very hard on what is the top decile doing that the rest of the team needs to learn?
But it will pay off, he says, arguing:
All of that work has been paying off in things like productivity numbers. We measure the productivity of our expansion Account Executives (AE) in terms of how many quality use cases do they win per unit time, per quarter, per month. Similarly, we measure the effectiveness of our Sales/Solution Engineers (SE) by how many use cases did they help their customer take to production.
The numbers speak for themselves. The number of use cases won per AE has increased by 86% year-on-year in the past quarter, while the number of use case go-lives per SE has increased by 58% year-on-year.
Given the promise of the future that Ramaswamy articulates, clearly there will be a lot of competition for leadership here. The advantage that Snowflake has, he suggests, is that success demands having “amazing enterprise data in context”. He explains:
[You] need to have all of the applications that a particular user is using and have context. These are the Salesforces and the Workdays and the ServiceNows and the SAPs of the world, and obviously, the awesome models that seem to have no bound in their capabilities for what they can do.
Snowflake is different, he contends, and proudly so:
What we are very proud of is we have created products that can capture what this work is going to be, but in a way that is true to what Snowflake is. I’m under no illusions that competing with Anthropic on the quality of Large Language Models that my team can create is a winning strategy. It’s not. It’s a failing strategy. But on the other hand, we can go head-to-head with Claude Code when it comes to CoCo [Snowflake’s native Coding agent], and say, ‘Here are the reasons why we are actually an important part of every customers and increasingly every partner’s data ecosystem’.
The firm’s CoWork enterprise intelligence agent is even more ambitious, he adds:
Obviously, it has its origins in Snowflake intelligence. But back when we first launched Snowflake Intelligence, which was November of 2024, we saw it as a place where all analytic data came together. But part of what we are realizing, again driven by large-scale use within Snowflake, is that it can be so much more. Once you are able to access all of the common applications that you have…and you have a platform in which work can be abstracted, work becomes very, very different, and again, is available like right in your pocket or your laptop.
We are earlier with these kinds of very large deployments of CoWork, but customers like WHOOP, tech-forward companies, are figuring out how to use a combination of CoCo and CoWork to transform how their teams operate. And in the analytics world, CoWork has already proved its mettle with any number of large customers, folks like United Rentals or Domino’s in Australia or one of the largest banks, which is delivering a personalized solution for all of their exec staff using CoWork.
It all comes down to a basic truth, he attests:
You know a quality product when you see one and you use it – and having that bar for creating amazing products matters more than ever.
But fresh competition is incoming. As the Snowflake Summit was taking place, OpenAI announced a new data analytics product of its own. Ramaswamy seems unfazed:
I think of this more as a set of skills that let you answer analytic questions and can generate SQL for Snowflake but also a bunch of other platforms that were mentioned…I think the market in front of them in the enterprise, which is to roughly get every company to re-think how work should get done, starting with things like software engineering, is very, very large. I suspect that that is where the bulk of their attention will go.
But ‘co-opetition’ with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic will be the way ahead, he suggests:
We both need to partner and compete. So in certain sets of customers, we will be competing, and we’ll sort of stay separate in that and be in our lanes, while in others, we collaborate. We have an excellent working relationship with both the model providers. And I actually think that the world is headed to a place where most companies want certain amount of model independence. You don’t have to squint that hard to understand that being reliant entirely on one model provider introduces the same kind of dynamics that sitting on exactly one CSP does for your business, especially if it’s large and ready.
Pragmatic, but with a healthy dose of fighting talk.
One other sentiment bears highlighting at this point as Ramaswamy evokes a saying of Google co-founder Larry Page:
Part of the thing that he drilled into my head that stays with me to this day is you will never win by aspiring to be someone else.
Onwards!
Image credit – Snowflake
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