C3 AI highlights C3 AI Vision, roadmap ahead

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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20240306 C3 Transform 2024 Day One Wrap Up from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

C3 AI outlined its product roadmap for the rest of the year and C3 AI Vision, which will provide spatial representations via data points. C3 AI Vision will cover a bevy of use cases for logistics, sourcing optimization, military, law enforcement, process optimization and aircraft readiness.

Tom Siebel, CEO of C3 AI, outlined C3 AI Vision at Transform 2024 holding an Apple Vision Pro. He had Apple's headset to highlight how spatial computing could ultimately be the user interface for C3 AI Vision. Siebel also said that enterprise software applications needed new interfaces as he compared his old Siebel Systems interfaces with Salesforce, Oracle and SAP to show how little things have changed.

Siebel said C3 AI Vision aims to take a step ahead with enterprise interfaces and vision will be critical for industries like logistics and manufacturing.

"C3 AI Vision can integrate data from any set of data," said Siebel. "The kind of data we need to ingest is drone images, telemetry, and AI models. This requires a new way of thinking. Our world is awash in data and to harness its true potential we must analyze it from every angle and experience AI decision support in a new immersive user experience."

Related: How Baker Hughes used AI, LLMs for ESG materiality assessments | C3 AI launches domain-specific generative AI models, targets industries | C3 AI CEO Tom Siebel: Generative AI enterprise search will have wide impact

Siebel said C3 AI Vision can be used to create digital twins on the fly so enterprises can visualize situations. Apple Vision Pro is in its first iteration and will improve over time and offer enterprises new ways to work with generative AI, AI and data. C3 AI Vision's interface will evolve over time, said Siebel.

C3 AI Vision will be embedded across the platform and applications focused on industries and use cases. 

C3 AI Vision demos were being held at Transform with preview sign-ups available.

Transform, held in Boca Raton, FL, will feature talks from customers such as Holcim, Con Edison, GSK, and US Air Force along with product roadmap discussions.

C3 AI's news at Transform follows a strong fiscal third quarter earnings report that highlighted accelerating revenue growth. The company reported a net loss of 60 cents a share and an adjusted loss of 13 cents a share on revenue of $78.4 million, up 18% from a year ago.

The company said that it closed 50 agreements in the third quarter including 29 new pilots. C3 AI said that its qualified pipeline was up 73% from a year ago. As for the outlook, C3 AI said fourth quarter revenue will be $82 million to $86 million. For fiscal 2024, C3 AI projected revenue of $306 million to $310 million.

The roadmap

Edward Abbo, CTO of C3 AI, walked through demos of what's in the C3 AI platform today and what's to come. Since launching C3 AI Generative AI last year at Transform, the company has deployed 47 customer use cases across multiple industries. US Air Force, Baker Hughes, Boston Scientific and Con Edison are reference customers.

"There's really a wide range of cases. Some of these sit on top of AI applications. Many of these are standalone, and so generative AI can really transform that human computer interaction helping you get insights faster, more effectively," said Abbo.

The architecture for C3 AI is to keep large language models distinct from the data. In a demo, Abbo walked through what's in the platform today.

As for the roadmap, Abbo said C3 AI's summer release will focus on retrieval augmented generation improvements. In the fall, C3 AI will focus on developer support.

The Winter release will revolve around converting intelligence into actions. "We want to focus on enabling actions not just following a workflow, but actually teaching the system how to do specific, complex tasks," said Abbo.

Business value focus

Adrian Rami, Group Vice President, Products & Engineering at C3 AI, said business use cases across industries can drive billions of dollars for oil and gas, manufacturing, healthcare and financial services.

Rami said enterprises need to pick the right use cases with high value, feasibility and repeatability while avoid custom builds. Enterprises need to scale across use cases with one AI, analytics and machine learning foundation. "We recognize what our platform needs to deliver for high value use cases with a common foundational data model," said Rami.

During a keynote, Rami said an enterprise AI application needs a series of tools and features. He also walked through C3 AI's suites for various functions and industries such as supply chain, reliability, sustainability, state and local government, defense and intelligence.

Jim Apostolides, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Operational Excellence at Baker Hughes, outlined how the company scaled C3 AI's platform. Apostolides now has more than 50% of inventory optimization accepted automatically without human intervention at the end of 2023. In 2021, that figure was 3%.

Baker Hughes also used C3 AI for sourcing optimization to improve purchase orders and other processes. Apostolides said Baker Hughes has focused on picking the right use cases and collaborating with C3 AI to drive value. Baker Hughes recently completed an upgrade to the latest C3 AI platform. 

Generative AI embedded throughout platform

Rami said generative AI has the potential to transform the user interface of the C3 AI platform and put data into common business terms. "This will fundamentally change the human-computer interface, and everyone can participate at scale," said Rami.

Jake Whitcomb, Senior Director, Products at C3 AI, walked through advances to make it easier to configure and deploy generative AI. C3 AI will launch a copilot across the platform that will work on multiple products.

The company has drilled down on interfaces with the aim of bringing insights forward quickly without a lot of configurations. C3 AI has launched a quick start feature to onboard data, train models, and configure the interface via C3 AI Studio.

Some screenshots from Whitcomb’s presentation.

CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks duel over platforms vs. bundles

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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The cybersecurity platform wars may be getting a bit chippy as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks duel as they try to convince enterprises to consolidate on their platforms.

This cybersecurity platform skirmish all started when Palo Alto Networks reported earnings and CEO Nikesh Arora said the company would offer incentives to entice enterprises to consolidate vendors. The catch is that Palo Alto Networks cut its outlook.

Enter CrowdStrike, which delivered strong fourth quarter results and said it would buy Flow Security. CrowdStrike reported fiscal fourth quarter adjusted earnings of 95 cents a share on revenue of $845.3 million. Wall Street was expecting adjusted earnings of 82 cents a share on $839.97 million.

For fiscal 2024, CrowdStrike delivered net income of $89.3 million, or 37 cents a share, on revenue of $3.06 billion, up 36% from a year ago. Adjusted annual earnings were $3.09 a share.

As for the outlook, CrowdStrike was also impressive. It projected first quarter revenue between $902.2 million and $905.8 million with non-GAAP earnings of 89 cents a share to 90 cents a share. For fiscal 2025, CrowdStrike projected revenue of $3.92 billion and $3.99 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $3.77 a share to $3.97 a share.

George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, had two weeks to prepare for the platform question and came prepared for the earnings conference call. He was so prepared that the word "platform" was mentioned 78 times on the conference call. 

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"CrowdStrike is the only single platform, single agent technology in cybersecurity that solves use cases well beyond endpoint protection," said Kurtz, who touted the company's Falcon platform with native AI. Kurtz argued that customers have gone all-in on Falcon and are increasingly adopting more modules. His argument was that enterprises are "leaving stitched together point products and PowerPoint platforms behind."

From there, Kurtz noted that the cybersecurity game is "is a frenetic vendor bazaar." He said:

"Disjointed point feature copycat products clutter the market, attempting to Band-Aid symptoms instead of curing the illness. OS vendors use their market position to create a monoculture of dependence and risk, and in many cases serve as the breach originator. Even worse, multi-platform hardware vendors evangelize their stitched together patchwork of point products masquerading as thinly veiled piecemeal platforms. And what organizations inevitably realize is that vendor lock-in leads to deployment difficulties, skyrocketing costs, and subpar cybersecurity.

The outcome is shelf wear and sunk costs. ELA and bundling addiction become the only way to coax customers into purchasing non-integrated point products."

Kurtz's punchline: The enterprise IT budgets are fine, but the fatigue over bolt-on products is real.

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CrowdStrike often takes aim directly at Microsoft and Hurtz noted that "we eliminated multiple Microsoft consoles and multiple agents to a single console, single agent, and single platform of Falcon."

But Palo Alto Networks' platform grab also was an obvious target. Kurtz said:

"A global financial services giant replaced their Palo Alto Prisma Cloud products in a large seven-figure deal. The Palo Alto cloud security products required separate management consoles and separate agents because cloud security is on a separate Palo Alto platform altogether. CrowdStrike was able to deliver an expected 70%-time reduction in management as well as more than $5 million in annual staffing cost savings. The patchwork of multi-product, multi-agent, multi-console, separate platform technologies resulted in visibility gaps, asynchronous alerts, and overall fatigue managing cloud security. Falcon single platform with its integrated cloud security components was a win for the customer."

The big takeaway from Kurtz was that enterprises shouldn't confuse "platformization" with old-fashioned bundling and freebies. He said:

"As you might imagine, I heard a lot about platformization over the last week. To me it's kind of a made-up, but what I believe our competitors are talking about is bundling, discounting, and giving products away for free, which is nothing new in software and security software. It's been done for the last 30 years. We know free isn't free. And what customers are saying is more consoles, more point products masquerading as platforms create fatigue in their environment. We've been focused on is that single agent architecture, single platform, single console that allows us to stop the breach, but more importantly, drive down the operational cost."

Arora, who spoke at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference the same day as CrowdStrike’s earnings report, defended the company's platform play. He said:

"This is totally different than bundling that's what we say it. Bundling is the economic bundle. You say if you buy one thing from me, you buy the second thing, you can buy the third thing for free or as part of the deal, you have to go spend it freely. Cybersecurity works differently because Chief Security Officers and CIOs don't get in trouble buying the best in a category.

It's different because we actually have to prove the value of these things working together because the customer already has the other use case. This is about actually going and demonstrating value from the integration as opposed to creating an economic construct."

Zscaler, the other security platform vendor in this race, had a take that rhymed with CrowdStrike as well as Palo Alto Networks. Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry said at the Morgan Stanley conference:

"The word platform has been hijacked just like the word Zero Trust has been hijacked. Platform is supposed to be a common set of services on which you build application A, B and C. It's not supposed to be a collection of acquisitions and labeled under a bundle. That platform is really nothing, but ELAs labeled as platform, which is becoming shelfware. Our philosophy has been platform can give you a good model. ServiceNow has built a good platform that works well together. How many vendors have tried to do a bunch of acquisitions they never came together. It's supposed to be a platform."

Chaudhry said enterprises have collected a bunch of best-of-breed products that don't add up. The way forward will be to consolidate vendors. In the end, 30 to 50 security vendors will be consolidated to a handful. Perhaps the question is less about CrowdStrike vs. Palo Alto Networks vs. Zscaler and more about what security vendors will walk the plank completely and which players (Microsoft and Cisco Systems with Splunk) have an incumbent's advantage. 

Salesforce launches Einstein 1 Studio, Data Cloud enhancements

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Salesforce launched Einstein 1 Studio and the Spring release of Data Cloud as it works to infuse copilots and low-code generative AI tools across its applications and platform.

The news, released at Salesforce's TrailblazerDX developer conference, was touted by CEO Marc Benioff during the company's earnings conference call.

Einstein 1 Studio is a low code set of tools to enable Salesforce customers to customize Einstein Copilot with Copilot Builder, Prompt Builder and Model Builder. Salesforce is aiming to be the trust layer between AI models and enterprises.

From a product perspective, Salesforce is pairing Einstein 1 Studio with its Data Cloud. In Einstein 1 Studio, Copilot Builder, which will have integration with MuleSoft APIs and Salesforce developer tools, is in beta. Prompt Builder is generally available so developers can reuse AI prompts. Model Builder, which allows developers to choose language models or build them, is also generally available.

Salesforce also released an updated version of Data Cloud. Here is the breakdown of some of the Data Cloud additions:

• Data Spaces, which allows customers to segregate data, metadata and processes, is generally available.
• Model Builder with a wide choice of LLMs is generally available.
• Related Lists, Copy Fields and Industries enhancements are generally available.
• Data Cloud for Financial Services is available.
• Data Graphs will get tools to define relationships between data points without SQL queries and manual data joints.
• Service Intelligence is available and uses models to provide insights for services teams.
• Triggered Flows are enhanced for testing and troubleshooting before activation.

Related:

• Salesforce posts strong Q4, adds dividend, outlook conservative
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• Salesforce launches Data Cloud Vector Database, Einstein Copilot Search
• CXOs placing bets on AI, analytics, automation going into 2024

Accenture goes big on AI reskilling, acquires Udacity, launches LearnVantage

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Accenture said it will acquire Udacity, an e-learning platform, and launch LearnVantage, a digital education and reskilling platform.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but Accenture plans to make a big splash in enterprise reskilling.

Udacity’s 230 employees will join LearnVantage, which Accenture said is aimed at training clients. Udacity, founded in 2011, has 21 registered users in 195 countries and a large content library. Udacity competes with Coursera, which has ramped up enterprise training. Accenture said LearnVantage will also look to partner with the ed-tech ecosystem, including Coursera.

In a statement, Accenture said it will work with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft on generative AI certifications as well as e-learning players such as Coursera, Pluralsight, Workera and Skillsoft.

Accenture said it will invest $1 billion over three years in the LearnVantage effort. Accenture aims to offer personalized training in generative AI, data science, cloud and security as well as CXO lessons.

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Julie Sweet, Accenture CEO, said reskilling and training will be critical. Sweet said the goal is to help clients "become ‘talent creators’—with people at the center of their reinvention using technology, data and AI—and a critical part of that is investing in industry-specific training and technology skills development."

LearnVantage is part of a larger effort to reskill Accenture's 700,000 employees. According to Accenture, it will roll out data and AI training to 250,000 technology professionals. Fundamentals of AI has rolled out to more than 600,000 employees. 

Twilio: We'll keep Segment with a new leader

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Twilio is staying in the customer data platform business. The company said that it has completed its review of Segment, will improve operations and the combination of Segment benefits its core communications customers.

The company during its most recent earnings report said Segment, which is about 7% of revenue, wasn't meeting potential. As a result, Twilio was reviewing what to do with the business.

In a statement, Twilio said the board concluded that Segment would undergo "tangible near-term operational changes to accelerate Segment’s path to break-even non-GAAP income from operations by Q2 2025 and non-GAAP operating profitability thereafter."

Khozema Shipchandler, CEO of Twilio, said Segment strengthens its communication platforms. Shipchandler also said Twilio has authorized an additional $2 billion in share repurchases.

According to Twilio, about 8,000 customers of its communications platform leverage Segment for insights and to create platforms. Segment is seen as a cog in Twilio's AI roadmap.

What's next? Twilio said Thomas Wyatt will become president of Segment March 11. Segment will also restructure, focus on AI and automation and increase its innovation velocity. These efforts will be led by Wyatt, who was previously led product and strategy at People.ai.

As for the outlook, which was on hold pending the Segment review, Twilio said it is expecting 2024 organic revenue growth of 5% to 10% with non-GAAP income from operations of $550 million to $600 million.

In fiscal 2025, Twilio is projecting GAAP operating profitability by the fourth quarter with Segment at break-even in the second quarter.

Box integrates Microsoft Azure Open AI Service, Box AI goes to GA

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

Box added a new integration with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in a move that will bring more large language models to Box AI, which is available to customers with Enterprise Plus plans.

Box AI is built to be platform-neutral so it can connect to multiple LLMs. Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service will bring models to Box's Content Cloud and meet various compliance regulations for financial services, life sciences, public sector and insurance companies.

The general availability of Box AI is part of a broader strategy to use the Content Cloud to surface insights from unstructured data, which represents 80% of enterprise content. Box's plan is to leverage AI for more high-level use cases across a wide range of industries.

According to the company, generative AI will enable its Box Content Cloud to enhance security, storage and collaboration of business content and enable enterprises to generate insights and content from repositories.

The bet is that high value us cases will drive growth going forward.

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In beta, Box AI was used for wealth advisory, clinical research, product marketing and human resources.

Box Enterprise Plus customers will get Azure OpenAI Service included with plans. Individual users under those plans have access to 20 queries a month. At a company level, 2,000 queries are available.

Separately, Box reported fourth quarter earnings. Box's fourth quarter revenue was $262.9 million, up 2% from a year ago. Net income was 57 cents a share. Non-GAAP earnings in the fourth quarter were 42 cents a share. Analysts had expected Box to report fourth quarter earnings of 38 cents a share on revenue of $262.8 million. 

For fiscal 2024, Box reported earnings of 67 cents a share on revenue of $1.04 billion, up 5% from a year ago. As for the outlook, Box projected first quarter revenue of $261 million to $263 million, up about 4% from a year ago, with non-GAAP earnings of 35 cents a share to 36 cents a share.

For fiscal 2025, Box projected revenue between $1.08 billion and $1.085 billion, up 5% from fiscal 2024. Non-GAAP earnings will be between $1.53 a share to $1.57 a share.

On a conference call with analysts, CEO Aaron Levie said:

"Combined with Box's upcoming workflow automation improvements, including the expected launch of Forms and Doc Gen this year, Box will be able to power end-to-end critical business processes natively without customers having to do any custom development. And with the acquisition of Crooze, Box will extend into new use cases within our current customers as well as enabling us to rip and replace legacy ECM solutions."

Regarding Box AI, Levie said:

"We were looking at a lot of the usage patterns, seeing their use cases. The first set of use cases were sort of dominated by the core functionality we have today, which is summarizing documents quickly, extracting information from documents as a user is sort of reading that. So, some powerful kinds of end-user productivity use cases. But quickly we got feedback that probably the biggest areas of excitement, and these are things that we've been working on, is one the ability to ask multiple documents a question. So that's the multi-document kind of analysis functionality that we're working on, that will be embedded in our hubs product."

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said Box hit a few key milestones in the quarter.

"Box has managed to break the $1 billion in revenue mark, which is always a historical milestone. The problem is the vendor made the goal at pedestrian speeds with 3% growth. The question is what is holding up Box, as the team around Aaron Levie is doing all the right things in terms of innovation. Let's see if the AI partnership with Microsoft and the acquisition of ECM low code / no code specialist Crooze will change it in the new fiscal year. Otherwise, Box will be a showcase of a software category that is innovating well but can't generate revenue. As Box is gaining customers, it must be all about innovation keeps up price levels but not growing revenue. That's good for customers, but not so good for Box."

ServiceNow CFO outlines method to Pro Plus SKU pricing

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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ServiceNow CFO Gina Mastantuono said the company's new generative AI SKUs, Pro Plus, is seeing rapid adoption, but it will take time to move the revenue needle. She also provided insights on how ServiceNow decides how to price its products.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference, Mastantuono said ServiceNow's AI SKUs were launched on Sept. 30 and it is the fastest growing product the company has launched, but "it's still new and it's still small in a $10 billion base."

According to Mastantuono, the Pro Plus lineup should make a meaningful contribution to revenue in two to three years. She added that ServiceNow is using generative AI technologies inside the company across all business functions for about 20 use cases and seeing productivity gains.

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"We're seeing millions of dollars of savings just this year by virtue of what we're doing internally," she said.

Mastantuono said:

"Most of what we're doing with our Gen AI SKUs, we're mimicking what we did with our initial AI SKUs and our Pro adoption back in 2018. And so, if you think about that Pro adoption versus the Pro Plus adoption, we're not building in accelerated adoption curve just yet. But if you think about the excitement, the understanding of the productivity gains that Gen AI can drive in 2024 versus what we knew and understood and what customers knew and understood back in 2018, there's an argument for sure that, that adoption curve will be faster."

She added that the upgrade from standard ServiceNow subscriptions will be a heavy lift to Pro Plus. Enterprises on the Pro plans already have a relatively easy upgrade path.

As for the pricing plans for Pro Plus, it's a 60% uplift relative to Pro SKUs. But there's a method to ServiceNow's pricing.

Mastantuono said:

"We did it very similar to how we price our Pro SKUs. So, when we launched Pro back in 2018, we had a 50% price uplift on the list price. And we did the same exact math, right? We looked at the productivity expectations, the efficiencies by task by employee salaries. And what we do is we give 90% of that value to customers and we keep 10%, that value equation seems to work extremely well with the customers. And based on our initial kind of one quarter out, feels like we're in the right place."

In other words, if ServiceNow can automate a task for someone in IT operations management who makes $100,000 a year and boost productivity 30% there's $30,000 in value. ServiceNow wants 10% of that sum in price increases.

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Mastantuono said that's rough math, but there are other moving parts to ponder.

"I don't think that 30% of one person's job is going away immediately. It's specific tasks. How many of the tasks that they do are going to be automated? I think companies are going to really have to lean into reskilling some employees, because it does mean that they have more time. I don't think that full jobs go away, but we make them much more productive. And reskilling in areas there's more value add."

Over time, Mastantuono said pricing will have seats, which are actually increasing with Pro SKUs, and there's consumption via tokens for large language models. ServiceNow is building capabilities for usage-based models too. Consumption models can work better as enterprises consolidate platforms. She said:

"I think there are a few different ways of thinking about potential pricing in the future. What I think is important is that efficiency and productivity is not just about time. It's about better resolution. It's about getting those IT issues solved faster, which means the employee who's either with the customer or building code and driving innovation can be more productive to drive better top line, better innovation across the board."

On the back end, ServiceNow is focused on domain specific language models, which use less computing power.

Snowflake CFO Scarpelli: Don't pigeonhole new CEO Ramaswamy as technologist

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Snowflake CFO Michael Scarpelli said it's foolish to pigeonhole new CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy as a technology when the business he ran at Google, the ad unit, had more employees than Snowflake has today.

Speaking at a JMP Securities conference, Scarpelli talked about last week's big news that Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman was stepping down and Ramaswamy was taking over. The transition news rattled Snowflake's market cap as shares tanked.

A week later, Scarpelli put some perspective on the CEO change. First, Scarpelli noted he has been through many CEO transitions before, and succession is part of being a chief executive. He noted that the board of Snowflake had been talking about succession for two years.

"When we acquired Neeva last May, I remember telling Frank, you've got to spend some time with Sridhar, and Frank quickly did. And we brought Sridhar onto our executive staff, and he quickly was running all of our AI and ML initiatives and the more time Frank, and the Board spent with him, we realized that he could be a successor to Frank," said Scarpelli, who just signed on for another three years as CFO. "If Sridhar were not the CEO here, I would just tell you, he'd be working at a very large company, maybe running all their AI Initiatives."

Scarpelli added that Ramaswamy scaled Google's ad business to $120 billion in revenue and had roughly 12,000 employees. Snowflake is just north of 7,000 employees. "A lot of people mistake that he's a technologist and doesn't have operational chops. He ran a very large team at Google," said Scarpelli, who noted later that Ramaswamy has a PhD in databases.

According to Scarpelli, Ramaswamy is going to be a good recruiter. "With where the company is and where it's going, you need to have someone with strong technical background to be able to run the company to help be able to attract good people as well too. He's very, very good at attracting the top technical talent," said Scarpelli.

Ramaswamy recently hired 5 core engineers from Microsoft, said Scarpelli, who quipped that he cringes as a CFO over the pay packages. "Some of these people you're talking $3 million, $4 million a year. A lot of that's equity," said Scarpelli.

With the extra talent, Snowflake is planning to speed up its path to product GA. "We need to shorten that time frame," he said. "I personally think the selection of Sridhar as the CEO is the right choice for what the company really needs."