Highlights:

  • Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service takes center stage as a key emphasis of the partnership.
  • Snowflake simplifies platform usage through integration with Azure ML, a machine learning service.

Snowflake Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are strengthening their partnership to make joint customers’ projects involving artificial intelligence easier.

Snowflake Summit 2023, which began recently in Las Vegas, featured the announcement of the expanded partnership.

Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service is a key area of focus for the collaboration. It offers cloud-based variants of GPT-4 and other machine learning models from OpenAI LP. Additionally, the service provides options for customization, allowing businesses to modify the models in accordance with their needs.

Snowflake and Microsoft are developing an integration as part of their expanded partnership that will simplify using Azure OpenAI Service with data stored in the former company’s cloud data platform. Businesses can use these records in various ways for their AI projects.

For instance, a business that employs Snowflake to store sales logs may use a language model from Azure OpenAI Service to identify which of its products is most well-liked automatically. As an alternative, neural networks can be trained using data from Snowflake. Microsoft recently added a new tool, Azure AI Studio, to its Azure OpenAI service, enabling businesses to train OpenAI models on unique datasets.

Additionally, Snowflake is facilitating the use of its platform with Azure ML, another machine learning service offered by Azure. It is a set of resources that businesses can use to create unique neural networks. Creating training data, feeding data into AI models, and checking deployed neural networks for accuracy problems are all made more accessible by Azure ML.

Beyond Microsoft’s AI service, the expanded partnership also includes other parties. For several other elements of the cloud portfolio of the tech giant, Snowflake plans to release new or improved integrations.

Power Automate and Power Apps, two low-code development tools, are the top two items on the list. With the former, business users can build straightforward software workflows to automate tasks like copying data between systems. Power Apps have a similar goal, but users can create whole applications rather than just specialized workflows.

The Azure Data Factory, an extract-transform-load (ETL) data service that can be used to transfer data between applications, is another area of emphasis for Snowflake’s expanded partnership. Among other things, businesses can use it to stream commercial records to their Snowflake-based analytics environments. Microsoft’s Azure Purview data governance tool and Power BI business intelligence platform will also receive priority under the expanded partnership.

Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake, Chris Degnan, said, “Snowflake’s partnership with Microsoft is evolving and focused on improving our field collaboration to help our customers enter the next wave of generative AI. Our integrations with Microsoft’s generative AI and LLM services will enable joint customers to leverage the latest AI models and frameworks, enhancing the productivity of developers.”

In addition to improving their product integrations, the businesses intend to work closer together on initiatives to increase customer acquisition. The expanded partnership between Snowflake and Microsoft will “significantly elevate” their joint go-to-market initiatives, the company said recently.