Equity · TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, Theresa Loconsolo

Snowflake’s transition from storing data to shipping with it

April 8, 2026·27 min·1 clip

Cortex Code started as coding help, then became an “abstraction agent” for non-technical users.

Snowflake is trying to change jobs. Rebecca Balan sets up the company as a data warehouse that now has to make stored data useful in the hands of customers. Ramaswamy makes the agent case without much fog. After Neva was acquired in 2023 and he later became CEO, Snowflake has been pushing deeper into AI features and agentic products. The ambition is loud. The day to day problem is less glamorous: can customers get these tools into production and keep using them. He gives a wide window. Some projects can go live in four weeks. Messier ones may take six months. Start small, then expand. That advice comes up again when Balan asks why agentic pilots fail. His answer is practical: users often do not know how to ask questions in a way that gets reliable answers from the data underneath. Snowflake has a working example. Its sales agent is rolled out to 5,000 go-to-market users and gets used every day, which Ramaswamy treats as real scale inside a 10,000-person company. Finance is tougher. He says he still does not have a good feel for querying a newer financial-data agent because the model is complicated. GAAP revenue is not raw consumption data. That is the useful test of the agent pitch. The interface can sound conversational, but the user still needs enough context to understand the answer. Balan keeps tightening the claim until the conversation sits on production readiness, customer value, and the partnerships Snowflake needs where customers are better served by someone else.

As heard by us

A clear look at Snowflake's push toward agentic products and the production limits that come with it.

Snowflake's move from data warehouse roots toward agentic products is the main thread, and the case made here is that owning the data is no longer the whole story.

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Want the clearest case for Snowflake's agentic reset?

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