Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy Talks AI Fuels

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Ed Ludlow** (0:07)
Let's speak to Snowflake's CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy. You've had three straight quarters of accelerating product revenue growth. And it seems a strange question, Sridhar. Good morning to you, welcome to the show. How much of that is AI?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (0:21)
Hi, Ed. Good morning, yeah, indeed. This quarter was pretty amazing for us. $1.49 billion in product revenue, up 37% year on year. We are doing this while also expanding operating margin by 400 basis points to 15%.
About half of the beat, the over performance came from AI. And what's nice about this moment is that AI is actually driving a nice feedback loop, because more customers are bringing data onto Snowflake using our AI products, Coco and co-work to get things done, which in turn is driving consumption on the platform, which sets up this very nice flywheel of people wanting to do more with Snowflake. And it's an effect that's pretty profound. It also gives us confidence about where we are headed. That's why we raised the full year guidance by 5% to 36% for the year.

**Ed Ludlow** (1:14)
What is Coco?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (1:16)
Coco is a coding agent for data. It comes as part of Snowflake. I've used it to write software as well, but what it specializes in is any job that you want to do with Snowflake goes 5 to 10 times faster using Coco.

**Ed Ludlow** (1:30)
Yeah, I know the answer. I was reading so much because the surprise that jumps out of the page is the momentum. 2,000 accounts added in that quarter.
The overall usage is really high in a market that is competitive. There are many coding agents out there. Why do you think that Coco is standing out, Sridhar?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (1:51)
Because it's the easiest sell for Snowflake as a company. I literally go to our customers and say, if your data team uses Coco, you can make things go five to 10 times faster. And we publish benchmarks on this. We are good at what we do compared to off-the-shelf models and even harnesses from the foundation labs. Coco is just a lot more effective on Snowflake jobs because it understands so much about Snowflake. And that's really the magic.
Plus, we don't have things like per user subscriptions. And a lot of the other products do. Coco is included for free with Snowflake. It's a consumption model. And it just makes this a very, very compelling product for every data team on the planet.

**Ed Ludlow** (2:35)
That business model is interesting. So if you added 2,000 accounts in one quarter, where does that show up or translate into revenue growth?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (2:46)
In, first of all, it shows up in AI revenue because people that are using Coco consume tokens. That's the first order effect. But the bigger effect is that they are doing all kinds of things on Snowflake. They are bringing more data into Snowflake. They are optimizing and debugging their pipelines. They are setting up things like interactive tables that can power dashboards. They're creating agents that go into co-work and can get deployed to business users. It's the second and third-order effect of Coco that's most interesting for Snowflake.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:19)
Remaining performance obligations, RPO came in below at least Wall Street's consensus estimates and expectations. How would you ask the market to interpret that figure, or what kind of emphasis would you put on it?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (3:34)
I wouldn't put a lot of emphasis on it. We are seeing this trend where the bigger renewals are getting pushed out by a quarter to the latter part of this year.
We are pretty confident that RPO will increase, especially in Q4, by a lot. Revenue is the leading indicator that drives everything. And as you know, that's very, very healthy.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:58)
We talked about Coco in the context of the other coding platforms that are out there. Generally speaking, a lot of the analysts ask about Databricks, right? And Databricks is talking about, you know, it's 80% growth. It's crossing $7 billion in ARR.
Where are they doing well against you? Where do you feel you're doing well against them?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (4:20)
It's a big market, first of all.
Our strength has always been in the context of a cohesive, easy-to-use, trusted data platform. Their heritage is more that of catering to developers, wide open code bases, sprawl of data, and not as much attention paid to things like governance and disaster recovery. And Snowflake is the place where enterprises have put their most valuable data, the one that they use to run their business, which is what sets us up super well to move upstream. Yes, technology is important, but I have so many meaningful conversations with our customers about how we can transform how their sales teams operate, or how we can help them optimize their supply chains. I would say that we are leveraging AI to do the kinds of things that we honestly would not have imagined possible three years ago. I'm very happy with where we are headed. Snowflake is becoming a lot more than a tech provider that's largely invisible. We are able to drive real outcomes for our customers.