Snowflake World Tour: How AI and data are powering India’s next growth story

At the Snowflake World Tour in Bangalore, the AI Data Cloud company outlined its progress in India and the road ahead. The event also marked five years of Snowflake’s operations in the country, a period that has coincided with rapid changes in India’s digital economy.

As Vijayant Rai, Managing Director, Snowflake India, noted, data has moved from being a back-office record to a boardroom priority, with enterprises rethinking how they use data to drive innovation and competitiveness.

Unifying data, powering AI

Rai underlined the core enterprise challenge: data fragmentation. Snowflake’s fully managed AI Data Cloud is designed to unify structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data on a single platform, making it secure, governed, and AI-ready.

He highlighted two recent developments:

Open Semantic Interchange (OSI): Launched just days before in collaboration with Salesforce, BlackRock, dbt Labs, and RelationalAI, OSI is a vendor-neutral standard for semantic consistency across AI and BI.

Snowflake Marketplace: With 3,500+ providers and 3,400+ listings, the marketplace allows enterprises to enrich their own data with third-party datasets, from financial feeds to weather intelligence.

Simplicity at scale

Adam Kaufman, VP, Industry GTM, Snowflake, built on the theme with a global perspective. Complexity, he argued, only creates cost and risk. Snowflake’s promise is simplicity—making data easy to use, scale, and secure.

He pointed to customers like Canva, which uses Snowflake for real-time product insights; Siemens, which unifies manufacturing and product data to accelerate decisions; and financial leaders PayPal and Fiserv, which leverage Snowflake for privacy-preserving data collaboration.

At the heart of the AI Data Cloud, Kaufman said, are three principles: easy, connected, and trusted.

Voice of the Customer: Dezerv

Adding a customer voice, Sandeep Jethwani, Co-Founder of wealthtech platform Dezerv, spoke of India’s first-generation investors, many of whom entered capital markets during the pandemic. Dezerv has already crossed ₹10,000 crore (about USD 1.2–1.3 billion) in assets under management (AUM) and has analysed hundreds of thousands of investor portfolios through its Wealth Monitor platform to help clients avoid recurring mistakes and build stronger portfolios.

The firm relies on Snowflake for scale, speed, and security. “I don’t think Dezerv could have existed without the Snowflake platform,” Jethwani remarked.

Under the hood: AI data cloud in action

Madhan Arumugam, VP of Global Support & Solution Engineering, Snowflake, unpacked the technology. He noted that while AI ambition is high, readiness is often low due to scattered data, poor quality, and legacy architectures.

He detailed capabilities such as:

-Cortex AI for structured analysis, unstructured search, and AI-powered insights within Snowflake’s secure environment.

-Support for Apache Iceberg to enable open table formats.

-Snowpipe Streaming and OpenFlow for real-time data ingestion and transformation.

-Agentic AI tools, including intelligent assistants, secure custom agents, and natural language interfaces.

His message was clear: “There is no AI strategy without a data strategy. Snowflake makes your data AI-ready.”

New skilling commitments for India

Snowflake used the Bangalore stage to double down on talent development.

Collaboration with ICT Academy: Scaling the Snowflake Academia Program in India. The initiative will equip educators with curriculum, platform access, and advanced courses in data engineering and AI. Over the next three years, it aims to train 1,000 educators and 250,000 students, with pathways to SnowPro certifications.

Collaboration with NASSCOM FutureSkills Prime: Launch of six new learning programs to make India a “Digital Talent Nation.” The goal: enroll 100,000 learners over the next two years in Snowflake’s entry-level data and AI courses.

Both initiatives build on Snowflake’s global One Million Minds + One Platform program, backed by a $20 million investment, with the aim of upskilling one million people worldwide on data and AI by 2029.

One platform, many possibilities

At the Bengaluru edition of its World Tour, the message was consistent: Snowflake is evolving beyond data management into a platform that unifies data and AI, while investing in India’s talent and ecosystem.

“Snowflake is one platform, many possibilities,” Rai said in closing, underscoring the company’s ambition to help India’s enterprises, start-ups, and professionals harness the next wave of digital innovation.