'The pace of innovation at Snowflake is in overdrive': Buoyed by OpenAI partnership, firm teases more big things to come

Snowflake’s recent $200 million partnership announcement with OpenAI is but one example of how the firm has its foot on the gas to accelerate innovation and deliver on its mission statement to help simplify complexity for organizations.

So says Christian Kleinerman, the firm’s executive vice president of product, who spoke with ITPro ahead of Snowflake's BUILD 2026 event in London this week.

“OpenAI is clearly a very prominent leader in the world of AI. I think what they've done with ChatGPT is nothing short of phenomenal, he said.

“The partnership is significant because now we're saying, let's bring those models into the enterprise and help customers connect the data that they've already entrusted Snowflake with to those models. I point out to customers that AI in the enterprise - without their data or without context – is the same as ChatGPT.

"But, once they plug in their context or information, their customer information, it lights up to provide answers that are relevant and meaningful to a company. That's the significance of bringing OpenAI models natively into Snowflake.”

In a press release detailing the OpenAI collaboration, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said the union set “a new standard for innovation.”

News of the partnership broke on the eve of the BUILD event, which itself brought a raft of announcements – including Cortex Code and Semantic View Autopilot GA and soon-to-be available Snowflake Postgres, which builds on 2025’s Crunchy Data acquisition – showcasing much innovation behind the scenes.

“We're announcing today all the major things we've done in the last three months, which maybe is the other thing to highlight: The pace of innovation at Snowflake is in overdrive. We held a BUILD broadcast from the US at the beginning of November. And here we are, three months later, with another truckload of innovation. That's how we're operating,” Kleinerman said, adding that, for him, the pace of innovation was “phenomenal.”

“It's an amazing type of busy. We're very proud of what we do.”

On the theme of doing rather than just talking about it, Kleinerman stressed the importance of organizations breaking away from AI theory into AI action. And quickly so.

“AI is happening today. AI is not something to talk about for next year or the next quarter. It is a reality. That’s the call to action: stop the testing and experimentation and the [talk of] we’ll do it at some point. The productivity gains are real, and the benefits are very measurable. Similar to what happened with data 10/15 years ago, those who get on board earlier are gonna have a competitive advantage,” he said.

“AI is happening now. Get on it. If you're not looking for the use case that you can have in production for your organization in the next couple of weeks, you're behind.”

Kleinerman’s keynote speech at the event drilled home the same message, with his presentation bookended by a slide that simply stayed “AI is today.”