Snowflake CFO Says AI Adoption Fuels Growth, Eyes GAAP Profitability in 2027

Key Points

• AI adoption is accelerating Snowflake’s growth: About 9,100 accounts have adopted Snowflake CoCo and more than 5,000 have adopted Snowflake CoWork. CFO Brian Robins said AI products accounted for roughly half of recent outperformance, while the company raised full-year growth guidance to 36% from 31%.
• AI is also strengthening the core business and migrations: Customers using CoCo or other AI products have generated an 11% uplift in core activity, while AI tools have reduced typical migration timelines from 10–11 months to about six months.
• Snowflake is targeting GAAP profitability in the fourth quarter of 2027: Management expects to achieve this through operating leverage and internal productivity gains without broadly restricting investment. The company added about 330 employees year to date, well below the roughly 940 additions in the comparable prior-year period.

Snowflake NYSE: SNOW CFO Brian Robins said the company’s recent momentum reflects strength in its core consumption business and growing adoption of its artificial intelligence products, while management continues to pursue operating efficiency and a path to GAAP profitability in the fourth quarter of next year.

Speaking at a Piper technology conference, Robins said he joined Snowflake in part because of its position in the AI market, its customer data footprint and the product leadership of CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. He said his priorities during his first year included improving go-to-market execution, supporting revenue growth and increasing operating efficiency.

Robins said the company has reaccelerated growth and generated operating leverage while introducing AI capabilities across its platform. He characterized the company’s latest quarterly results as strong across both its core business and newer AI offerings.

AI Product Adoption Contributes to Growth

Robins said Snowflake’s consumption-based model is supported by detailed forecasting tools that analyze customer and product-level activity across regions. The company runs several machine-learning models nightly, he said, with executives receiving a detailed forecast each morning.

He noted that forecasting newer products is more difficult because of their shorter operating histories. Snowflake applies a “haircut” to early adoption data when setting guidance, he said, rather than assuming recently elevated growth rates will persist unchanged.

According to Robins, Snowflake CoCo has become one of the company’s most successful product launches. He said approximately 9,100 accounts had adopted Snowflake CoCo, while more than 5,000 had adopted Snowflake CoWork.

Management is focused on expanding usage within those accounts by helping sales teams identify use cases that can bring more users onto the platform, Robins said. He added that the company has seen benefits to its core business from AI adoption, citing a LinkedIn post by Ramaswamy that indicated customers adopting Snowflake CoCo or AI products have generated an 11% uplift in core business activity compared with what they otherwise would have done.

Robins said roughly half of the company’s recent outperformance was related to AI products and the other half was tied to the core business. He also said Snowflake raised its full-year growth guidance to 36% year over year from 31%, a 500-basis-point increase in one quarter.

Migrations and Legacy Modernization

The CFO said AI tools are helping Snowflake reduce migration timelines for customers moving workloads to its platform. He said migrations that previously took about 10 or 11 months now take about six months, although customer dependencies prevent the company from eliminating the process time entirely.

Robins said Snowflake continues to see a significant opportunity to migrate legacy data workloads and serve organizations that do not yet have AI-enabled solutions. He referenced an addressable market projected to reach roughly $300 billion over the next five or six years, excluding adjacent analytics, business intelligence and other potential uses for Snowflake CoCo and Snowflake CoWork.

He also emphasized the importance of helping customers manage consumption costs. One of the company’s most-used skills is a cost-optimization tool, he said. Snowflake aims to ensure customers understand their usage, the value they receive and the return on investment from their deployments rather than facing unexpected consumption bills.

Profitability Plan and Workforce Efficiency

Robins defended Snowflake’s plan to reach GAAP profitability in the fourth quarter of next year, arguing that growth and operating leverage are not mutually exclusive. He said the company is continuing to spend where it believes investment is needed and has not placed constraints on the business to achieve the profitability target.

Snowflake’s high gross retention rate and net retention rate mean that a substantial portion of its business comes from customers that have expanded their usage over several years, he said. AI products are also broadening the number of employees within customer organizations who can use the company’s platform.

The company is using its own technology and AI tools to increase productivity across finance, engineering, sales and other functions, Robins said. He said Snowflake added roughly 330 employees year to date, including about 170 to 180 employees from the Observe acquisition, compared with roughly 940 additions during the comparable prior-year period.

Robins cited internal tools that pull data from about 40 sources for daily finance reporting, automate monthly close analysis and support long-term planning. In sales, he said an internal agent called Raven can help prepare account executives for customer calls and could eventually provide forecasting checks by connecting information across enablement tools and Salesforce.

Looking ahead, Robins said fourth-quarter contract renewals are a normal seasonal pattern for the company because they align with customers’ budgeting cycles. He said Snowflake’s sales representatives engage with customers weekly on AI adoption, migrations, cost savings and potential replacement of legacy analytics tools, and he expressed no concern about the concentration of renewals in the quarter.

About Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW)

Snowflake Inc NYSE: SNOW is a cloud-based data platform company that helps organizations store, process, analyze and share data. Its platform is designed to support data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, application development and business intelligence across public cloud environments.

Snowflake's Data Cloud enables customers to consolidate and access structured, semi-structured and unstructured data while supporting secure data sharing and collaboration. Its offerings include Snowflake Cortex, which provides artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities, as well as tools for developing data applications and using data from Snowflake's marketplace and partner ecosystem.

Founded in 2012, Snowflake serves businesses, government organizations and other institutions globally through cloud infrastructure provided by major public-cloud platforms.

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