Real business outcomes fuel AI adoption across ASEAN, says Snowflake’s Joglekar
“Partners need to be part of a journey where they are not only delivering technology outcomes and doing just old school platform migrations and modernizations anymore,” says Satchit Joglekar, Regional Vice President & Managing Director, ASEAN, Snowflake.
Organizations in the ASEAN region continue to see a strong need for data management, especially as they look to build and deploy more AI workloads. For Snowflake, the AI journey for all these organizations starts at how they manage their data. This includes having access to the right data and also ensuring they are meeting all regulatory and compliance requirements.
Satchit Joglekar, Regional Vice President & Managing Director, ASEAN, Snowflake believes that organizations are now seeing an urgency to bring AI and its not just because they’re seeing everyone doing it. Instead, he believes its because businesses are finally seeing the real business outcome, they are able to get from their AI investments.
In Singapore, Snowflake and implementation Infinite Lambda, developed Animal 360, a secure, AI-powered internal platform for Mandai Wildlife Group. The platform enables animal care and veterinary teams to access trusted insights through natural language. Snowflake’s integrated platform brings together previously siloed data enabling teams at Mandai Wildlife Group to retrieve insights in minutes instead of navigating multiple systems.
“AI is only as good as the data behind it, and what Mandai Wildlife Group has built shows what becomes possible when that data is unified, governed and accessible," Jenny Koh, Country Manager, Snowflake Singapore said.
"The collaboration is part of Snowflake's broader commitment to enabling data-driven impact across industries in Singapore and the region, and we are proud to see Snowflake's infrastructure being used in service of something as meaningful as animal care.”
Mandai Wildlife Group’s use of AI is a clear example of how an organization is getting value from their AI. Using Snowflake Cortex AI and large language models (LLMs), the platform allows users to retrieve information and summaries in natural language to build context more quickly before applying their professional judgement.
Over at the Malaysian edition of the Snowflake World Tour 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, the AI Data Cloud company also showcase capabilities of its innovations that were announced at the Snowflake Summit 26 in San Francisco in June this year. Innovations like Snowflake CoCo and Snowflake CoWork caught the attention of nearly 700 attendees at the one-day event.
Snowflake in ASEAN
CRN Asia caught up Joglekar during the summit in Kuala Lumpur to understand more about the vendor’s growth plans in the regions, opportunities for its partners in the region as well as how the vendor is dealing with the challenges customers are facing in their AI journey.
According to Joglekar, Snowflake now has availability regions across four countries in Southeast Asia following the recent announcements of regions in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.
“With us going locally in all these local countries and data centers, even large, regulated customers also seeing that they now deploy AI use cases with trust on the Snowflake data foundation. Having data localized within the country and not moving outside the country's borders is very critical for most of our enterprise customers, as well as for our government and financial services customers,” he said.
Joglekar explained that this one of the reasons for their investments in Malaysia, which now ensures customers that now Malaysian enterprise data stays within Malaysia on Snowflake in AWS within the Malaysian boundaries. At the same time, it is also ensuring that it meets Malaysian data privacy and localization, and also data privacy requirements.
Interestingly, Joglekar also mentioned that Snowflake has seen an increase in both enterprise and mid-market customers in the region, which is also why the vendor has two different go to market teams, with each focusing on either market.
“Snowflake serves a wide variety of customers all the way from a three-person startup to a 10,000-employee company, and we serve everything in between and those as well. We are seeing a lot of take-ups both in mid-market as well as enterprises and almost equal amount of growth on both sides of the house,” he said.
The AI opportunity
Just like the customer success story with Mandai Wildlife in Singapore, Joglekar mentioned that a lot of organizations in the region are not just looking at the urgency to have AI but also AI that delivers ROI and real business outcomes. This is also why there is now an urgency to get the data foundations right and accelerate data modernization.
“In the past data modernization was treated as a platform modernization initiative whereby customers have old legacy systems and look to a modern system like Snowflake and unlock new use cases. But it was still a platform modernization conversation. Now, looking at some of the successful deliveries that we've done, we've seen real business outcomes that are directly affecting either the top-line revenue or saving costs on the bottom line. That is leading a lot of companies to say that they cannot wait for a technology or a platform refresh cycle to modernize their data estate now,” he explained.
Specifically, Joglekar shared that customers are urgently wanting to get their AI use cases running now because their business can’t wait.
“That has been a big change where we are seeing the acceleration of these modernization and data transformation projects, driven by AI. So, AI has almost had a pull effect on that,” he added.
The partner opportunity
Given this scenario, Joglekar believes that there is no better time to be a Snowflake partner right now because the vendor is doing a lot more than just platform modernization.
“If you were going to be a Snowflake partner just to do platform modernization, from an old platform to a new platform, a lot of people could do that. But now our partner ecosystem working with us has a huge opportunity to differentiate themselves because they are deep in the customers domain. We have partners who specialize in different verticals. We have partners who specialize in different areas of the data ecosystem, whether it's data engineering or AI ML or even applications on data products or collaboration,” he said.
For Joglekar, AI is making it even partners even more relevant to customers because customers are looking for GSI or consulting partner that understands their business know exactly what is going to move the needle when it comes to AI use cases.
“So, it is a very exciting time, in fact a lot of our partners are engaged in projects that are directly speaking with business users, business stakeholders, not just CIOs and heads of data,” he said.
Joglekar also pointed out that Snowflake’s partner ecosystem has grown by leaps and bounds.
“We have more than a hundred odd partners in the ASEAN region in Snowflake alone, and that has grown exponentially since the last three or four years when we properly launched our partner program. We're also seeing an influx of a whole new set of partners who are not just technology provider partners or as systems integrators, but a new breed of partners that are embedded in particular specific business domains,” he explained.
Joglekar shared that these partners understand very specific data models verticals, whether it's banking or telecommunications or retail. Snowflake is seeing partners pop up who are very specialized in these areas and whereby in the past would only be serving those domains and wouldn't be touching data platforms because that was the partner's job.
“But now with AI, it's increasingly becoming important for partners to understand data platforms as well because AI is increasingly becoming embedded in the data and especially the Snowflake approach is embedding, bringing AI to the data rather than the other way around. So, these partners are seeing that opportunity as well, those verticalized domain partners,” he said.
Joglekar also highlighted that Snowflake, partners and customers are equally responsible for the outcome that they have all set out to achieve and the business outcome.
“It's not a technology outcome. It's a very clearly called out KPI, a business outcome. And we are all holding ourselves accountable for it. We are all holding ourselves accountable to the timelines as well. If we say 14 weeks, we're going to deliver this agent; we're going to all co-build this together. And we'll all only celebrate success after we deliver it in 14 weeks. That is the request from our customers. But we are also very much encouraging our customers and partners to also structure themselves this way as well,” he said.
The ROI discussion
The business outcome is also where the discussion on ROI takes place. Joglekar shared that when Snowflake works with clients, the vendor draws a very clear value hypothesis based on their business challenge.
“We say that these are the business challenges and technology challenges, leading to the capabilities that our partners have that will help them solve those challenges. And we put that together in a value hypothesis, including these are the potential results that we'll achieve if we go for this. We define all of this upfront and we get alignment across ourselves, our partners and our customer ecosystem, including the business stakeholders.”
“And we continuously validate that value. We define that value upfront, and then we validate that value. And even at the end of the deliverable, we again say, have we delivered that value? And we do not take any engagement nowadays without that,” he added.
Bringing real business outcomes
For Joglekar, Snowflake does not want to deliver just technology projects for the sake of technology alone. That's very important right now because a lot of companies have invested, and they are now looking at what's next. He feels businesses want the outcome because otherwise it's just another shiny new toy.
“The urgency to deliver clear, well-defined ROI and business value from their AI use cases and urgency to do it quickly is a common theme through all my conversations. And I am seeing this urgency coming from the board level. It's not just a data team problem or a specific business problem. Because this technology is so transformative that if done right, it can mean building a huge differentiator in a competitive mode for an organization versus their competitors, if they get it right. And hence, the urgency,” he explained.
Compared to the past on how businesses look at AI, the urgency, especially from the board means the foundations need to be right, and the business outcomes need to be well defined.
As such, Joglekar feels that it’s a good kind of urgency to have that will drive real outcomes because now everyone is working together towards a common goal.
“Some of the early adopters, actually more than 90-odd percent actually saw value from AI, right? So, those who got it right got it right. They had a very high level of confidence and also returned on investment. And when they speak to their peers and share some of these success cases, there is clear value that was being delivered and others now want to be part of that. And so, the urgency started increasing once they started hearing that there are good and successful stories out there from organizations globally,” he said.
For Joglekar, this is a good kind of urgency and it's going to lead to entire industries uplifting themselves because it is being done in the right way and being done collaboratively and from the right levels.
When asked how the partner ecosystem can make the most of this urgency, Joglekar shared that the message is very simple to the partner ecosystem. They need to be part of a journey where they are not only delivering technology outcomes and doing just old school platform migrations and modernizations anymore.
“Let's be part of a journey where we are on the same table as the C-suite, as the board of our customers. Not because we said so, but because they see that value in us, and they want us to be in that room, on that table, defining those outcomes and co-building and co-delivering together. And so, we take that outlook, and we highly encourage our partners to do so. Our most successful partners in the future, from now onwards, will be the partners that have that DNA,” he concluded.