Standing still is riskier than doing nothing when it comes to AI: Snowflake urges companies to embrace the era of the agentic enterprise

There’s been a lot of talk - and some action - about AI, but now is the time to really take things to the next level and make AI real for your business.

That was the key message tech giant Snowflake wanted delegates to take away from its Snowflake World Tour London event earlier this week. The event, hosted at the ExCeL, played home to more than 5,000 attendees, 60 partners, 72 sessions and 150 speakers.

“It's fantastic to see so many of you here. Customers, partners, innovators, data visionaries from all across the region wanting to make AI real for [their] business. What an incredible time to be together. The energy today will tell you everything about the pace of change we're seeing across our customers and industries,” said Jimmy Hall, Snowflake’s vice president and country manager for the UK and Ireland in his welcome address.

“Year after year, we've seen organizations across this region move at an incredible speed. [They’ve been] moving beyond pilots and experimentation, and putting AI into production at scale. [Ultimately], taking those ambitious ideas and turning them into real operational value.

He added: “We've moved from talking about the potential of AI to putting AI to work. It's now all about making AI real for business as we enter the era of the agentic enterprise; we're operating in a fast-moving environment. Arguably, the biggest risk any business could take right now is standing still. But moving fast with data and AI shouldn't mean losing control. It means having the foundation, the flexibility, and the confidence to move quickly.”

Data underpins AI ambition and results

That foundational element is key, according to Hall and his Snowflake peers. Indeed, while the momentum gained sounds very exciting, he cautioned that organizations must not forget the fundamentals. You cannot successfully implement an AI strategy unless you have the solid foundations of a good data strategy to support it, Hall stressed.

“There is some myth about data. Some organizations have been of the mindset that AI is so good and so smart, the data will sort itself out,” said Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake’s EVP of Product.

“The reality is not quite. It won't happen. If anything, the opposite is true. The most amazing results you can envision for your organization with AI come from having a great data strategy.”

Event attendees looking for inspiration as to how to move the theory into reality didn’t have to wait too long. Hall was soon joined on stage by Kate Dohaney, CEO of giffgaff.

“I joined about eight months ago, and I knew we had a massive opportunity to lean into the world [of AI],” she said.

“We were already optimizing Snowflake at different levels and in different teams within our organization, but commercially we weren't seeing what we wanted from it. So we [created] a proper data strategy team and [have been] really teaching our business as a whole how to optimize information to better serve our customers.”

The company is keen to automate as much as possible, to free up valuable human resources from time-sink tasks so they can be more productive elsewhere, according to Dohaney.

“That means taking out the repetitive work, understanding the market, understanding our competitors, and having that ability without weeks and hours of human capital research. Snowflake has given us the right tools to move at pace,” she added.

“It empowers our business. It’s about partnering with the right tools, the right partner, to move quicker.”

Recipe for success

For organizations to truly benefit from what it means to be an agentic enterprise, they need to embrace four key elements, according to Kleinerman.

These are the choice of AI model, software and apps, enterprise data, and context, with all three of these linked in the middle to an agentic control plane, which Kleinerman described as “the glue”

He added: “That's what makes all of this together. This framework is high level. It's agnostic of any one technology or any one vendor. This is what we believe is needed for any of you to leverage and deploy AI successes.

“The promise of AI, in my mind, is unparalleled to other technologies that we've seen at least in our lifetimes. And hopefully, everyone here is excited about how you can help your organization achieve greater successes through the power of AI.”

Hall concluded the keynote by saying that we’re in the midst of “the biggest structural shift in enterprise technology of our lifetime.”

“As I said earlier, the biggest risk you could take now is standing still. The companies that will win this decade won't just apply standalone agents; they will build an agentic enterprise,” he continued.

“Turning this vision into reality requires investing in your data foundation today, and that comes down to three core priorities: one is modernizing your data space; secondly, making your data AI-ready; and thirdly, driving autonomous action and impact with AI.”