Snowflake Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Thank you. Thank you. Thrilled to be here.

Yeah. There's always been a lot of demand for data modernization, but the word migration strikes terror in the hearts of pretty much every CIO or CDO, honestly. Everyone in engineering. It just takes forever, highly uncertain outcome, and so on. I think AI is having a pretty profound impact on how quickly you can get those done, and expectations, not just from me, for my team. I've talked before about how I want migrations to be mostly automated, but even customers are expecting it. We have a very large manufacturing client, for example, do a Teradata migration. Planning aggressively to finish it in less than three quarters is not something you would have heard of in 2024. That's part one of a lot more is possible, let's go get it done.

What is equally interesting is now the ability to have conversations at a data platform level, at the level of Snowflake, we just stayed out, generally, of a lot of these kinds of conversations, is having them about how we can deliver business value. It is everything from how can we automate invoice processing at a really large energy manufacturer. Because processes like this are always super manual, super spotty. They would do spot checks here and there. They estimate that on $10 billion that they pay out every year, they'll be a percentage point more efficient, except that that's an astronomical amount of money. It's talking about that or talking about supply chain optimization or talking about how do you implement a custom CDP a whole lot faster.

It's having conversations like that that I think are very distinctly 2026 compared to the previous one, where honestly, most CEOs wouldn't even bother to talk to me. It's like, "Oh, a data vendor, who cares?" I think that change is what is remarkable about this moment.

I would say this is a larger trend. AI fundamentally is making software industrialized, and I won't underestimate, even now, the threat that it poses to every tech company, every software company. It's a profound shift. What it has also done is it has obliterated the distance between what a data platform like Snowflake is and what applications running on top of data can be. Now, stuff that people build on top of Snowflake will not look like your standard packaged SaaS app. It'll have its own look and feel. We can talk about that. But the other thing that it's done is it has also squished the distance between a data platform and actually what used to be called services. Because you can begin to automate a lot of things. Inasmuch as software, it represents what we humanity call intelligence. That's what they do. They put workflows.

They put data structures into place. They organize our thinking. AI accelerates that massively, which is why a number of folks, because they can now bring the power of coding agents, are basically saying, "Wait, I can compress the time of something like a migration massively and also feel very confident that the weird problems that'll come up during any real migration, the little odds and ends, can also be fixed equally quickly." They're sensing an opportunity because the majority of the industry is still operating on time and material, a lot of time and a lot of materials and a lot of money.

The progressive system integrators are going, "I can guarantee outcomes." This is what we do as well, where we are saying we can deliver outcomes for our customers simply because the ability to get things done fast is much better now than before, but also the ability to deal with unknown things is just also a whole lot better. It's the combination of these that I think will drive a massive change through the services industry. Not that I think services will go away. It's just going to look dramatically different, a lot smaller than what it did before, but one that is much more tied to what are the outcomes that customers want.