Snowflake’s AI strategy fuels first-quarter growth and partner demand. Here are five key insights for solution providers.
For solution providers, Snowflake’s latest quarterly performance showed continued strong AI demand plus that demand translating into greater consumption of Snowflake’s traditional data products—even though the big headline after earnings was the company’s stock jumping about 40 percent due to quarterly growth.
These were some of the forward-looking takeaways for channel partners from the Bozeman, Mont.-based vendor’s earnings call Wednesday for the three months ended April 30.
Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy (pictured) even tipped his hat to the growing importance of solution providers to the vendor’s go-to-market during the call, highlighting work by a U.K.-based solution provider, Infinite Lambda, which can build customer 360 applications in about five hours with Snowflake tools.
[RELATED: Snowflake CEO: ‘I’m Not In The Business Of Selling AI. I’m In The Business Of Creating Value.’]
Snowflake Q1 Shows AI Adoption Growth
Snowflake AI tools are so effective at speeding up migrations that partners are switching their business models from time-and-materials to outcome-based pricing, Ramaswamy said on the call, according to a transcript.
Snowflake has seen its ecosystem grow immensely in recent years, with Ramaswamy telling CRN in February that it has more than 14,200 global partners, up 22 percent year over year and 24 times the 600 partners Snowflake had in 2022.
“There is a ton of activity within Snowflake and outside by partners, for example, to build even more complicated skills and processes on top of this,” the CEO said.
Eduardo Ramos, CEO of Austin, Texas-based solution provider Viewnear, is looking to differentiate his company in the partner ecosystems of Anthropic and data analytics vendor Snowflake by marrying expertise in both companies, Ramos told CRN in an interview.
Viewnear has been building enterprise-grade production AI systems with governed Snowflake data anchored on Anthropic Claude, giving users goal-driven AI agents that can complete multistep work with an outcome-based business model, Ramos said.
“We’re [doubling] down, investing in tooling, in certifications in partnership with Snowflake,” Ramos said. “Data and AI are coming together. And people, leaders are understanding now that if they want to do AI, they need to do data first. And for us as a company, that’s full circle because when we come into a client for Snowflake services, we end up selling enterprise agentic solutions with Anthropic. And vice versa.”
Here’s more of how solution providers can prepare for opportunities ahead based on Snowflake’s latest results.
Snowflake AI Growth
Snowflake’s Intelligence and Cortex Code—also called CoCo—AI offerings are seeing the fastest adoption of any new product in company history, Ramaswamy said on Wednesday’s earnings call.
Users leverage the company’s Snowflake Intelligence as a natural language interface to enterprise data, context and actions, the CEO said. CoCo offers natural language prompting for making applications, pipelines, agents and workflows.
Intelligence accounts more than doubled quarter on quarter to more than 5,000. And the number of CoCo accounts now exceeds 7,100, with CoCo only becoming generally available in February and Snowflake reporting 4,400 accounts last quarter. The company is also working to maintain the 75 percent gross margin it has with AI products.
Internally, Snowflake has used CoCo to drive more than 25 percent faster case resolution times. Engineers have reduced complex case resolution time by about 30 percent and cut time per ticket by about 40 percent. It’s automated more than 100 workflows across Snowflake finance, marketing sales and human resources in weeks.
Snowflake Intelligence and CoCo also offer a robust surface for users looking for a control plane for managing AI agents, Ramaswamy said.
“Through this operational transformation, our teams are moving with greater speed and focus to capture the AI opportunity in front of us,” Ramaswamy said.
While some Snowflake watchers have worried that frontier AI tools would outperform something like CoCo, Ramaswamy said on the call that CoCo does better with operations in Snowflake than those tools. CoCo also supports third-party data platforms like rival Databricks, Amazon Web Services Glue and Apache Airflow.
Growth reported by Snowflake and enterprise application vendor Salesforce, which also reported quarterly results Wednesday, shows that enterprises aren’t cannibalizing software spending with AI initiatives, Wedbush said in a report after the call.
Snowflake now sees more than 13,600 accounts using AI and machine learning weekly, up from 9,100 the prior quarter, TD Cowen said in a report after the call.
Snowflake’s product revenue for the quarter of $1.33 billion, up 33 percent year on year, came in above the $1.27 billion Wall Street expected and marked the highest growth since 2025’s third quarter. It was also the strongest sequential dollar growth in company history, helping fuel the jump in stock price.
Executives on the call signaled that they expect to keep outperforming. They said to expect 30 percent growth year on year in the second fiscal quarter, above Wall Street’s 26 percent expectation, reaching $1.4 billion in revenue.
AI remains a small percentage—low single digits—of Snowflake revenue, implying a large opportunity ahead, William Blair said in a report after the call.
This was the second consecutive quarter in which Snowflake product revenue accelerated in growth, according to a Morgan Stanley report after the call. Key for the vendor looking ahead is growing usage among business users and developers, two customer types new to Snowflake.
Snowflake’s newfound efficiency and productivity growth through AI use internally also showed up in a relatively flat employee count growth. The company only hired 17 employees during the quarter, not counting employees who came over with the Observe acquisition.
AI Drives Core Snowflake Platform Consumption, Not Disruption
Alongside growth in Snowflake AI products, the vendor showed that AI demand is increasing consumption of its data products, which also holds opportunities for solution providers.
Snowflake’s technology brings together a unified governed data foundation, access to leading AI models, connectivity across enterprise applications and workflows plus a unified agent control plane—all of which is needed to unlock quality AI-powered results, Ramaswamy said on the call.
Customers are also deploying and scaling workloads faster, with the number of use cases and individual projects managed on Snowflake deployed in the quarter more than doubling year on year.
The number of use cases won per account executive increased 86 percent year on year in a signal of better sales execution and the potential of internal AI use, Ramaswamy said. Engineering productivity also doubled with CoCo.
Customers want to migrate workloads to Snowflake faster to have the data, context and governance needed to power AI securely and at scale. And 42 percent of Snowflake customers share data on the platform with at least one stable edge—a continuous, active data-sharing connection between two or more accounts—Ramaswamy said. That’s up from 40 percent the prior quarter.
“That interconnected foundation becomes even more valuable in the age of AI,” the CEO said. “Snowflake isn’t just software. It is a circulatory system, connecting modern enterprises, enabling data applications and AI agents to move securely and seamlessly across organizations.”
Snowflake’s latest results helped alleviate concerns that AI models prove a threat to the vendor’s traditional business, with current remaining performance obligation, a measure of future business, beating Wall Street expectations.
CRPO came in at $4.6 billion, up 38 percent year on year. Wall Street expected $4.5 billion and growth of 35 percent. It also grew 2 percent from the prior quarter. On average, Snowflake’s cRPO growth has come in flat over the past two years, according to a KeyBanc report after the call.
For the 2027 fiscal year, Snowflake said to expect $5.8 billion in product revenue, growth of 31 percent year on year. That came in above Wall Street expectations of $5.7 billion and 27 percent growth. That forecast also marked an additional $180 million Snowflake executives expect since they last shared guidance, according to KeyBanc.
Frontier AI models are converging in quality, moving customer value from models to data orchestration, good news for Snowflake and its peers, Wedbush said in a report after the call. Data orchestration acts as a trusted layer between enterprise data and external models and is a ripe revenue generator for companies.
RPO Miss, Competition Grows
Snowflake didn’t have a perfect quarter, missing Wall Street expectations in some measures of future business as competition around data warehousing, federation and analysis continues to grow.
That missed future business measure, remaining performance obligation, came in at $9.2 billion, up 38 percent year on year, when Wall Street wanted $9.5 billion and 42 percent growth.
That also marked a quarter-on-quarter decline of 6 percent, deeper than the 3 percent decline the vendor has seen on average over the past two years, according to a KeyBanc report after the call. However, company CFO Brian Robins noted on the call that customers prefer renewals in the fourth fiscal quarter.
Billings of $907 million, up 18 percent year on year, also disappointed. Wall Street expected $977 million and 27 percent growth.
The vendor added more than 600 net-new customers, up 38 percent year on year. But that marked a decline from 744 the prior quarter, according to KeyBanc.
The competitive landscape in data products includes fierce Snowflake rival Databricks and similar products from cloud vendors looking to take share from Snowflake, Bernstein said in a report after the call. Microsoft has its Fabric offering, for example. Salesforce offers a Data Cloud and SAP has a Business Data Cloud.
The vendor needs to show sustained growth and that users aren’t looking to leave Snowflake to store data in Software-as-a-Service and use SaaS as the interaction layer for data analysis and AI-powered actions, according to Bernstein.
Channel partners who spoke with the investment firm report more aggressive migrations of on-premises data—even critical data—to the cloud to avoid managing that data in two places and frequently updating the data.
Along with that concern, Snowflake’s products sitting on top of hyperscaler cloud providers could mean that data is easy to access by Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google’s answers to Snowflake’s portfolio, according to Bernstein.
Salesforce’s quarterly earnings report may have offered a warning for Snowflake, with a deceleration in growth for Salesforce data visualization tool Tableau.
$6 Billion AWS Partnership Deepens Snowflake’s AI Infrastructure Strategy
One of the more exciting reveals alongside quarterly earnings was Snowflake’s expandedpartnership with cloud giant Amazon Web Services.
Snowflake and AWS now have a $6 billion five-year agreement to accelerate enterprise AI adoption worldwide. The new agreement more than doubles the previous contract from about three years ago.
Snowflake already runs its data and AI services on AWS, but the company said this is its largest commitment to date to AWS. Snowflake plans to go deeper with AWS on product integration across GenAI and agentic AI. The vendor also plans to invest more in AWS Marketplace, customer success programs, workload migrations and industry-focused products.
AWS Marketplace sales for Snowflake exceeded $2 billion in calendar year 2025 and $7 billion since inception, Ramaswamy said on the earnings call.
The data product vendor will also leverage high-performance Graviton processors running in AWS data centers for AI model training, inference and other tasks. Snowflake will expand its global footprint in AWS data centers with launches completed or underway in 10 new regions including Auckland, New Zealand; Cape Town, South Africa; Bangkok, Thailand; the AWS European Sovereign Cloud and others.
The Snowflake-AWS deal improves Snowflake’s unit economics with lower compute and bandwidth costs, William Blair said in a report after the call.
Snowflake has also invested in partnerships with AI upstarts, including $200 million with OpenAI revealed during the quarter.
Natoma Acquisition Should Improve Snowflake MCP, Agent Control Abilities
Alongside disclosing its quarterly earnings and the new AWS partnership, Snowflake also revealed that it plans to buy Natoma, the developer of an enterprise Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform for AI agents.
The deal should increase Snowflake’s ability to govern data assets, AI actions and interactions across an enterprise, according to the vendor. Users should have an easier time securely connecting and managing how AI systems interact with their enterprise applications, databases, APIs and tools.
Snowflake plans to integrate the capabilities into its AI Data Cloud. With Natoma capabilities, users will have the ability to send e-mails, summarize conversations, check calendars, open tickets and more, even leveraging third-party apps like Salesofrce’s Slack and Atlassian’s Jira without leaving Snowflake Intelligence or CoCo, Ramaswamy said on the call.
“The important point is not just convenience, it is control,” the CEO said.
Snowflake’s recently acquired Observe observability business added less than a percentage point of product revenue growth during the quarter, which the vendor expected as it continues integrating the company. Observe likely contributed about $9 million in revenue for the quarter, according to a KeyBanc report after the call. Snowflake expects Observe to add 1 percentage point of product revenue growth for the full year.
