How Snowflake, NVIDIA, and Microsoft are pioneering generative AI for business innovation

• Snowflake and NVIDIA’s partnership boosts AI application development.
• Alongside NVIDIA, Snowflake enhances its alliance with Microsoft for broader integrations.

Generative AI, with its potential to revolutionize user and customer experience, is attracting the attention of many enterprises. A notable entity involved in this progression is Snowflake. The company is delving into the capabilities of generative AI, striving to weave it into its platform. This ambitious integration could potentially spawn efficient solutions, elevate customer satisfaction, and spearhead novel applications within their portfolio of services.

At the Snowflake Summit 2023, a series of partnerships focusing on the application of generative AI in various business scenarios were unveiled. One significant alliance is between Snowflake and NVIDIA, geared towards equipping businesses of diverse sizes with an expedited trajectory to develop tailor-made generative AI applications, using their proprietary data securely housed within the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Leveraging generative AI for various business

Leveraging the power of the NVIDIA NeMo platform, known for its proficiency in developing large language models (LLMs), and NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated computing, Snowflake intends to provide enterprises with the ability to utilize their data to create bespoke LLMs. These can be used in advanced generative AI services such as chatbots, search, and summarization, all while keeping proprietary information secure within the Snowflake ecosystem.

During the Summit, Frank Slootman, Chairman and CEO of Snowflake, emphasized the potential impact of their partnership with NVIDIA. He proposed that this collaboration could bring high-performance machine learning and AI to its extensive volumes of proprietary and structured enterprise data, ushering in an era of exceptional insights, predictions, and solutions for the global business landscape.

Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, reiterated the vital role of data in shaping generative AI applications that resonate with individual companies’ unique complexities and voices. “Together, NVIDIA and Snowflake will create an AI factory that helps enterprises turn their valuable data into custom generative AI models to power groundbreaking new applications — right from the cloud platform they use to run their businesses,” said Huang.

The collaboration between NVIDIA and Snowflake opens up new possibilities for enterprises, allowing them to employ their proprietary data – an immense collection of raw and curated business information – to create and fine-tune custom LLMs. These LLMs could then power bespoke applications and services catered to specific business needs.

By blending AI technologies from Snowflake and NVIDIA, customers can rapidly develop, deploy, and manage custom applications that bring the prowess of generative AI to every aspect of their businesses. Moreover, the expansion of AI capabilities within the Data Cloud enables customers to build generative AI applications where their governed data already resides, ensuring data security while significantly minimizing cost and latency.

From healthcare to retail and beyond

Snowflake’s Data Cloud, currently catering to over 8,000 customers worldwide, allows enterprises to integrate, analyze, and share data within and beyond their organizations. It also allows customers to develop and distribute cutting-edge data applications on a large scale.

The unified platform that Snowflake offers has been designed to facilitate innovative solutions across many sectors and business lines, encompassing everything from advertising and media to manufacturing and telecom. Their most recent endeavor, the Government and Education Data Cloud, aims to catalyze data-driven decision-making within the public sector.

The alliance between Snowflake and NVIDIA is set to further transform these sectors by introducing custom generative AI applications to various verticals within the Data Cloud. For instance, a healthcare insurance model could provide detailed responses to intricate questions about procedure coverage. In contrast, a financial services model could disclose specific lending opportunities tailored to the unique circumstances of retail and business customers.

NVIDIA’s NeMo, a cloud-native enterprise platform designed for constructing, customizing, and deploying generative AI models, will be hosted and deployed on the Snowflake’s Data Cloud. The plan is to allow customers to build, customize and deploy their custom LLMs. These will serve as the foundation for generative AI applications like intelligent chatbots and search systems. This arrangement provides an efficient and secure method of utilizing generative AI, potentially significantly enhancing business operations in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Watch the highlights of the Snowflake Summit 2023, showcasing the partnership between Snowflake and NVIDIA:

An expanded partnership: Snowflake and Microsoft

In addition to NVIDIA, Snowflake has also broadened its partnership with Microsoft, paving the way for novel product integrations across various domains such as AI, low-code/no-code application development, and data governance. The two companies will also implement innovative programs to enhance their joint go-to-market strategies and optimize field collaboration, bringing solutions directly to the customers. Snowflake has committed to significantly increasing its Azure expenditure as part of this collaboration, with both parties collectively supporting go-to-market initiatives.

Chris Degnan, Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake, underscored the evolution of Snowflake’s partnership with Microsoft, highlighting the shared focus on boosting field collaboration to assist their customers in navigating the upcoming wave of generative AI. He expressed, “Our integrations with Microsoft’s generative AI and LLM services will enable joint customers to leverage the latest AI models and frameworks, enhancing the productivity of developers.”

Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft, pointed out that the expanded partnership will integrate Snowflake’s Data Cloud expertise with Microsoft’s cloud technologies and AI capabilities. The amalgamation of these strengths aims to assist customers across different industries to create intelligent solutions for superior data management, understanding, and governance.

Snowflake aims to reinforce its strategic endeavors with Microsoft by providing data scientists and developers with premier AI tools. The initiative encompasses the creation of novel integrations between the Data Cloud and Azure ML, alongside leveraging synergies with Azure OpenAI and Microsoft Cognitive Services. These collaborative efforts with Azure ML will enhance the efficiency of machine learning development to production workflow for customers, providing them with the latest frameworks and integrated CI/CD, and more.

In a bid to construct intelligent data products by capitalizing on the latest advancements in AI, both companies are devoted to facilitating Snowflake customers’ access to Azure OpenAI and Microsoft Cognitive Services, securely and conveniently, with Snowflake data.

Snowflake also aims to continue delivering seamless customer experiences through improved and new product integrations across a range of complementary Microsoft products. These include Purview for data governance, Power Apps & Automate for low-code/no-code application development, Azure Data Factory for ELT, and Power BI for data visualization.

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