AI must 'accelerate the core' of your business: Snowflake CEO

Snowflake (SNOW) CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy sits down with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to explain how the software company has leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) to avoid the SaaSpocalypse and come out ahead amid the AI boom.

Another winner here looks to be software player Snowflake. The company's stock is fresh off ripping almost 40% in response to a strong quarter and even stronger guidance in large part because of AI momentum. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy joins me now.

What is it like to deliver a quarter like that and get the market response that you did? What has been, what has it been like the past few days?

I think we've clearly demonstrated that uh AI is compounding Snowflake's strengths in data. As you said, we had the strongest sequential growth ever in the quarter.

But I think the bigger point that I want to make is that AI is changing the nature of work, how you and I and everyone else is going to be working. It's creating new categories of products and so leading with product innovation, products like Snowflake co-work and Snowflake Coco, uh that are getting very broad adoption. It's by leaning into all of these that we've been able to demonstrate uh such strong potential.

Not every company is like your Snowflake, uh like Snowflake right now that is benefiting really from AI. They may show it so on the top line, but they're not benefiting on the bottom line like you. Why do you think there is that disparity starting to emerge?

Because it is actually hard to transform yourself with uh with AI. It takes a lot of hard work. It takes a new way of thinking about work. It may it requires every employee to say, how can AI truly benefit me even if I need fewer people to get my job done.

Part of our message internally is that we need to show, we need to practice what we preach and that's why you see our sales teams acting differently. Our communications, our investor relations, our finance teams all doing it. But the benefit of that is that when we talk to a customer, we can actually bring in subject matter experts, Brian Robbins, our CFO, and have them talk to the finance team in our customer about how it's transformed its his life. I think practicing what you preach is our biggest asset and we press on that with full advantage.

What are what are some of the biggest changes companies should expect from AI over the next few months?

Roughly my mental model is that AI needs to accelerate the core of what you are as a company.

I reductively describe Snowflake's job as creating great software, deploying great software, selling software and getting our customers to deploy it. So we spend a lot of time thinking about how do we make each of these go faster with new products that we can create and how we innovate.

Having that clear eyed view of where can it make a difference. Brian, you know this, companies really want to do two things, make more money, spend less money. And figuring out how AI can help you do both of that, that's the unlock. That's the unlock for Snowflake as well as we talk to our customers.

Uh NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, uh some interesting comments over at Computex in Taipei. He he pushed back on this notion that AI is a job killer. He called it complete nonsense. Would you agree with that?

AI can bring up so much more opportunity. You can get things done faster. Some things will be done faster with uh with AI.

And uh at Snowflake, for example, we used to have a demo team. Uh now anyone can create a demo. I can create a demo. What we did was move that team over to a quota carrying function where they can actually win more customers and win more use cases for us. That's the kind of internal transformation that's going to be essential. Uh but companies can do a lot more, expect more from themselves by using AI.