Snowflake’s Amy Kodl on how AI changed the data platform’s revenue workflow

For the first months of the year, the share price of data platform Snowflake foundered as investors soured on a slew of workplace software stocks. Then, after its most recent earnings report, the company’s stock surged 36% in one day, where it’s more or less stayed in the weeks since.

Amy Kodl, Snowflake’s SVP of worldwide alliances and channels, said the moment was a reminder that AI is still only as good as the data supporting it. The company wants to position itself as a “control plane” layer as more companies adopt AI agents.

We spoke with Kodl about what this concept means, how AI has changed how her team works, and what the future holds.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Snowflake’s stock dipped earlier this year amid the whole “SaaS-pocalypse” narrative, and then shot back up after earnings. What do you think investors had misunderstood about Snowflake?

AI is a changing landscape. Let’s just say that. We obviously have really strong partnerships with a lot of SaaS companies and with the AI frontier model providers. I can’t really comment on the markets per se, because I’m not an analyst and I’m not our CFO, and that’s not my domain. But I think what we’re seeing is really a deep understanding of the role Snowflake plays in this changing landscape, and I think…there’s just a lot of clarity now around Snowflake as this agentic control plane.

We saw this in [the Snowflake] Summit, which followed our earnings announcement very closely. We saw a lot of clarity for our customers, and then obviously that would translate to the analysts, around the role that data plays in this new AI agentic era. As we said on stage, models change and will continue to change, and data stays. And that applies to obviously the frontier apps, and the large enterprise tech apps as well, but I think this [is about the] idea of the role that data plays, and that data is your differentiator.

We’re not SaaS. And I shouldn’t speculate, but there was just maybe a lack of clarity around the role that Snowflake plays, and it’s really clear now in our messaging that we came out with that as the agentic control plane. We’re able to manage, in the enterprise, the role that data plays across all of the enterprise apps and the frontier model providers.

What is an “agentic control plane”? Why is Snowflake best positioned to serve as that?

Enterprises are really looking for…a system that coordinates across your data, the models, and applications in a governed, trusted, secure, grounded way. That could be, across an enterprise, sitting in multiple places.

Snowflake is uniquely positioned in the crown jewels: the data that makes all of that work. When you think of the models, there’s a lot of things that matter. Obviously, speed and scale. But the data is what makes the models accurate…Snowflake is uniquely positioned in all the technology stack that’s out there to best do this. It can’t sit in the application layer. It shouldn’t sit in the LLM layer. It’s in the data layer.

How have agents changed how you work and how Snowflake’s revenue team operates?

It really is changing. Every day, we learn something new, and the beauty of working at Snowflake is we have unbridled access to all of our own technology. It’s really put information that gives you insights and the ability to make decisions differently into the hands of business users that may have historically had to go—even in a data company—ask for your operations team or some support to go get you answers. Everyone’s talking about how it’s shrunk this time to value, but what that means for me is time to access data. Rather than it taking days or weeks to get information, I have it at my fingertips, and my ability to get that information and then make business decisions quickly as a result is having an immediate impact, just in terms of the pace at which we’re able to assess our decisions as leaders.

I start all my days with a couple things. One is what [Snowflake’s coding agent, Cortex Code, or CoCo for short] thinks are my top priorities for the day, which is fascinating and very on point. Because of the connected nature through our MCP servers and some recent acquisitions…we’re able to access all of our Google Suite and Salesforce and other technology tools. So it has access to all the same information I have access to, and it connects a lot of dots in a really incredible way. What are my priorities for the day? It supports me being able to dive into understanding trends across my business that I would otherwise have an analyst do for me.

The other thing that it does in my business, which I think is really, really interesting in the alliances space specifically, is…briefing documents. It’s getting our executives and leaders prepared as they’re going into conversations on the health of the partnership and how we’re performing on where we’re connecting, and it’s able to actually write those briefing documents for us now, so there’s a lot of access to information that really I think accelerates your ability to turn those insights into action: You’ve got data. How do you get the insights from the data? And then how do you drive behavior or action differently? Getting the data is easy now. Getting those insights, and then I can take action much faster.

With AI capabilities changing so fast, how do you stay ahead of trends? What does that look like in the next year or so?

It’s moving very quickly, as we all know. A year ago, conversations were around what AI could do. Today, we’re in this position where customers are really focused on [generating] business value from that. A year from now, it’s hard to predict. Buyers are asking a lot of really tough questions about prioritization and where they should focus the AI. There’s credibility in AI. There’s [the] art of the possible: figuring out where you apply it, how it gets implemented, how you govern it, and how this ultimately fits into the broader go-to-market strategy.

There’s purchasing decisions that are less about what individual tool, but about the ecosystem broadly and how to think about making sure they’ve got the right foundation, the right processes, how they manage their organization through the change, and trying to figure out how they turn this into the fabric of their company’s future.

This is fundamentally changing how businesses operate, and so I think a year from now we’re going to start to see it way more integrated into the way businesses operate as it becomes more of a trusted enabler, more of a trusted accelerant of businesses.