For Snowflake, partners are key to successful AI strategy
Southeast Asia holds huge opportunities for Snowflake as it looks to strengthen partners to help businesses understand their data strategy to ensure a successful AI strategy.
Business leaders have high hopes that artificial intelligence (AI) investments can drive market-changing innovations to transform everything from customer satisfaction to product innovation. However, a poor data foundation is holding 78% of organizations back from achieving these goals.
For businesses around the world, AI is expected to transform their organizations, especially in improving productivity and efficiency. However, in order to achieve this, businesses need to understand the importance of having the right strategy in place.
As companies continue to have big ambitions with AI, a recent report from MIT Technology Review Insights in partnership with Snowflake highlighted that only 22% of business leaders are very ready to engage with AI. In fact, business leaders' confidence in AI is changing, especially when they realize their organizations are not fully prepared to implement AI despite the hype they’re having.
The need for an AI strategy is imperative as businesses look to maximize their potential in not just developing but harnessing the best results from their AI investments. For Snowflake, having the right AI strategy goes down to having the right strategy.
In a conversation with CRN Asia, Ash Willis, Vice President, Partners & Alliances in APJ for Snowflake stated that while the initial excitement of AI hasn’t died down, businesses are beginning to take a deeper look into their AI strategy and how they can be implementing AI projects.
“Financial services companies for a long time have really understood the value of data. Even from an AI perspective, they have been the early movers. However, most of the solutions they use are applicable across all industries as well. I really see AI changing every industry. And it's just that some of them are earlier adopters, and it's probably because they've been more technologically advanced over time. They’ve probably got better data assets and a better appreciation for data. But we're seeing this across all industries at the moment,” explained Willis.
The role of partners in delivering AI
As Willis clearly points out, businesses want to make sure they’re going into AI with their eyes wide open and have a real strategy to enable success. However, Willis explained that the bulk of AI projects fail not because the technology is not ready but because business do not have the right data strategy.
At the same time, Willis also pointed out that there’s not a lot of differentiation in industries when it comes to the underlying technology. As there are many platforms to host data, Willis stated that the main problem businesses face is when it comes to the real business use cases.
As such, partners play an important role in helping businesses understand how they can plan their AI strategy by implementing a proper data strategy. In Southeast Asia, Willis stated that Snowflake’s partners in the region are helping businesses to not only understand their data strategy but also develop use cases that can be beneficial for them.
“Once you start to get into real business use cases, that's where the domain expertise and industry expertise the partners can bring to the table is super important. For example, a large energy company in Southeast Asia would have a specific type of question that they're asking and the level of depth that they're going into. You really need a partner that has solid expertise in that particular sector. We really lean on partners heavily to bring that industry expertise to the table,” he explained.
From his conversations with partners, Willis mentioned that they’ve really invested a lot of time and funds in proof of concepts for customers. But most of them fail because the customer does not have their data in order.
“You can make a proof of concept look fantastic when you're running off the same set of data. But as soon as you have to do that across customer records, that’s when it fails. So, Snowflake’s partners have really warmed up to Snowflake’s message that there isn’t an AI strategy without a data strategy and are now helping customers understand that they have to get their data in order before they can truly jump into AI,” explained Willis.
As most of the partners Snowflake works with already have industry expertise, Willis said they focus now on helping them understand how Snowflake plays into that industry narrative.
“We've got industry clouds and accelerators who have long term industry domain expertise. We go in and educate them on how to take advantage of that and to get a little bit more specific from a partner's perspective. My team's just in the process of rolling out what we call Snowflake Partner Network (SPN) Connect. It's a twice-yearly partner roadshow that we run all over Asia Pacific. We also conduct an online session to kind of cater for the other markets. These efforts are 100% focused on educating partners. We talk about the technology but also pivot more towards these use cases,” added Willis.
The future of AI
Interestingly, Willis believes that some of the more established industries that are working on AI are probably going to develop use cases that haven’t even been thought about yet in the next two to three years. The ongoing evolution and education of technology will be key to enabling this.
As for Southeast Asia, Snowflake is going to continue to invest in the region. According to Willis, this is driven by the massive growth opportunities for Snowflake in the entire Asia Pacific region.
“We're not going to slow down. We are going to double down, if not triple down on investments in the region. Specifically, we’re thinking about how we can turbo-charge our partners through enablement. For Snowflake, skills are critical and we’re going to continue to invest in that space this year and in 2025 as well,” said Willis.
This includes directing more funding into educating businesses and educating partners on industry use cases not just on examples on how to sell, but also how to have these AI conversations more broadly. He added that Snowflake will also keep investing in partner incentives to make sure this is a good business for partners as well.
With that said, Willis strongly believes that there are plenty of opportunities for partners to help businesses in their AI journey in the region.
“We see a massive opportunity in the apps space and personally, in my team, we're going to invest more in helping people and partners build applications on top of Snowflake and take those applications to markets that's integrated more broadly into our marketplace strategy. In fact, our most used application globally on the Snowflake marketplace was built by a partner from this region and we're really proud of that,” concluded Willis.
With improved and better enablement, incentives and ensuring partners thrive, Willis strongly believes that partners can not only drive Snowflake’s growth in the region but also ensure businesses have the right data strategy in their AI strategy.