Empowering India’s AI future through data: Snowflake’s Vijayant Rai on innovation, collaboration, and talent

Snowflake is expanding its presence in India as enterprises fast-track data and AI adoption. From unifying fragmented data to fostering AI-driven innovation and large-scale skilling, the company is deepening its commitment to the Indian market. Vijayant Rai, Managing Director – India, Snowflake, speaks to Dataquest about how the company is scaling its impact across industries, enabling collaboration, and nurturing a data-first, AI-ready workforce. Excerpts.

How do you see Snowflake evolving in India?

Snowflake’s journey in India is relatively new, we have been operational here for about five years, though globally we were founded in 2012. We began during the COVID period, which coincided with massive digital adoption. Our early customers were digital-native, born-in-the-cloud companies looking for best-of-breed data solutions.

Since then, we have been innovating heavily on the Snowflake platform, which has given us a second wave of market traction. Today, we are scaling consistently across verticals such as manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, and financial services. We have also made investments in the public sector, which we believe will become a key growth opportunity in the coming years.

In just a few years, Snowflake has built a strong presence across multiple regions in India with hundreds of customers across diverse industries.

How has the data and AI market evolved in recent years, and how has Snowflake adapted to these changes?

Customers today look at data very differently. As they scale their digital journeys, they see the cloud as a destination for elasticity and agility. More importantly, data is no longer viewed merely as a system of record, it is now a strategic asset.

The advent of generative AI in late 2022 accelerated this shift. Organisations realised that unless their data estates were structured and reliable, they could not take advantage of AI. That is where Snowflake plays a crucial role, we help customers modernise their data in the cloud while ensuring compliance with local data residency and sovereignty requirements, particularly in regulated sectors such as financial services.

Clearly, data has become a boardroom priority, and with the cloud and AI converging, the ability to operationalise data intelligently has become the real differentiator.

India is one of Snowflake’s fastest-growing markets. What is driving this traction?

India is a key focus market for Snowflake, a territory identified for growth and continuous investment. There is significant headroom here, given the scale of digital transformation across sectors. India is also among the fastest-growing regions for us in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ).

We have a sizeable workforce in India, including a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Pune. The CoE team focuses on both internal innovation for Snowflake and customer-facing projects. It also works on different use cases on our own platform, essentially applying Snowflake to Snowflake to push the boundaries of what is possible.

What are the main data challenges you see enterprises facing, and how is Snowflake helping address them?

The number one challenge remains data fragmentation, driven by years of heterogeneous IT evolution. Data today lies in silos, across CRM systems, transactional databases, and other repositories, making it difficult for organisations to gain a 360-degree view of their customers or operations.

Another challenge is accessibility, how easily can enterprises access and collaborate on data across their ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and customers? Snowflake addresses these problems through a fully managed platform that helps unify data across silos. India, being a highly fragmented data environment, benefits greatly from this approach.

Data sovereignty and residency are becoming critical themes. What is Snowflake’s position on this?

Data sovereignty and residency are global issues, and Snowflake is fully compliant with local regulations wherever we operate. We adhere to the laws of the land and are extremely mindful of how and where data is stored. We also have a dedicated security and compliance team that works closely with regulators to ensure our customers remain compliant.

How do you collaborate with hyperscalers in India and globally?

We have strategic agreements with all three major hyperscalers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This multi-cloud strategy gives us flexibility and allows our customers to choose the cloud that best suits their needs. In India, we currently operate on AWS and Azure, enabling customers who are on different clouds to work seamlessly across environments.

How is Snowflake delivering measurable value to enterprises and helping CXOs accelerate AI adoption?

The biggest deliverable for any enterprise today is return on investment (ROI). Snowflake’s fully managed architecture helps customers reduce operational overhead while unlocking faster business insights.

In the AI space, for example, we integrate with multiple large language models (LLMs) and make them available natively to our customers on the Snowflake platform, ensuring data integrity and control. The pace of innovation in this area is remarkable, with new capabilities emerging almost weekly.

What are Snowflake’s current business priorities and the key data-driven disruptions you are tracking?

Collaboration is emerging as one of the biggest trends across industries. With data now structured, semi-structured, and stored in the cloud, enterprises need to share and collaborate securely. For example, financial institutions increasingly use third-party data sets, and Snowflake enables them to access these natively through our Marketplace without complex ETL processes or costly data extraction.

We are also seeing Indian independent software vendors (ISVs) building innovative solutions on top of the Snowflake platform, and many of these are now being exported globally. The ‘India-for-the-world’ innovation momentum is real and accelerating.

Skilling is a major part of building a sustainable data ecosystem. What initiatives has Snowflake launched in India?

Skilling is absolutely critical to building the data ecosystem. We have several initiatives in motion under our global programme One Million Minds + One Platform, aimed at upskilling one million people worldwide in data and AI by 2029, supported by a USD 20 million investment.

In India, we are advancing this mission through collaborations with national and regional partners. Earlier this year, Snowflake announced a collaboration with FutureSkills Prime, the digital skilling initiative by NASSCOM and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), to launch six learning programmes that aim to make India a true Digital Talent Nation. Through this partnership, we will enrol 100,000 professionals and students in Snowflake’s free, on-demand entry-level data and AI courses over the next two years.

We also recently announced our partnership with ICT Academy to scale the Snowflake Academia Programme in India, a comprehensive initiative designed to equip educators and students with direct access to data and AI technologies. At its core is faculty enablement, providing educators with curriculum support, free access to the Snowflake Platform, and technical foundations, including advanced courses in data engineering and AI. Through this collaboration, Snowflake and ICT Academy aim to train over 1,000 educators and 250,000 students in the next three years, offering hands-on experience and pathways to globally recognised SnowPro certifications.

These initiatives are part of our broader commitment to empower India’s youth, enhance employability, and prepare a future-ready data workforce. Alongside these programmes, we host Build developer seminars across Indian cities throughout the year to strengthen the developer ecosystem and create opportunities for applied learning.

Can you give instances of how Indian enterprises are using Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud?

A growing number of Indian enterprises across industries are using Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to drive innovation, efficiency, and business outcomes.

Chalo, India’s leading bus transport technology company, leverages AI and digitisation to enhance passenger and operator experiences. By analysing massive volumes of real-time and historical data, Chalo predicts bus arrival times with precision. Tools such as Streamlit and Cortex AI further empower non-technical teams to query data in natural language, reinforcing a strong data-driven culture.

In the agricultural space, Grow Indigo, a leading AgriTech firm, demonstrates the power of AI at the grassroots. The company uses Document AI to automate farm boundary validation and deploys AI-powered data bots for dynamic information queries, improving decision-making across departments.

In aviation, IndiGo, India’s largest airline, has adopted the Snowflake AI Data Cloud to build a unified and secure enterprise data hub. This enables real-time insights, optimised operations, and predictive analytics that allow IndiGo to anticipate trends and enhance efficiency across the business.

In financial services, Godrej Capital, the lending arm of Godrej Industries, uses the Snowflake AI Data Cloud as its integrated data platform to manage risk, streamline reporting, and make data-driven lending decisions. By democratising data, the company improves transparency, enhances customer experience, and accelerates innovation.

Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company, one of India’s leading insurers, relies on Snowflake to create a comprehensive data platform that provides a unified view of customers, agents, and partners. This enables better trend analysis, opportunity identification, and product design, ultimately improving customer experience.

Meanwhile, Edelweiss Asset Management Company Ltd, one of India’s fastest-growing mutual fund firms, has modernised its data infrastructure with Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. Working with NuSummit, Edelweiss AMC has unified all data into a single, cloud-native environment, improving performance, agility, and investor experience. The firm reports up to 50% cost savings through Snowflake’s pay-as-you-use model while managing complex workloads efficiently.

These success stories underscore how Indian enterprises are using Snowflake’s platform not only to improve operational agility but also to unlock the transformative potential of AI and data-driven decision-making.

Finally, how do you view India’s long-term role in Snowflake’s global growth?

India has a massive opportunity ahead. The ambitions of Indian enterprises, and their pace of technology adoption, are truly inspiring. We are deeply committed to the Viksit Bharat vision. Through Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, we are enabling businesses to unlock greater value from their data and derive meaningful outcomes from AI.