'AI will enhance work, not replace it': Snowflake to hire 700 in India by 2025, says Vijayant Rai

Vijayant Rai, Managing Director (India) at Snowflake, in an interaction with Business Today, said the company has significantly expanded its presence in India over the past five years. The AI data cloud company works with leading enterprises and digital natives, including IndiGo, Razorpay, Swiggy, Shiprocket and Bajaj Allianz to drive large-scale data and AI adoption.

Rai highlighted that Snowflake will grow its India workforce to over 700 by 2025 and deepen partnerships with Deloitte, EY, TCS, LTIMindtree, AWS and Microsoft. On talent skilling, Snowflake has partnered with NASSCOM to train 1,00,000 students and professionals in AI and data over the next two years. He added that India is a key growth engine in Snowflake's global strategy, with AI projected to add $1 trillion to the economy by 2035, positioning Indian developers at the forefront of global AI innovation.

Here are the edited excerpts from the interview:

Q: What are the biggest milestones for Snowflake in India?

Vijayant Rai: Over the past five years, Snowflake has established a strong presence in the Indian market. We've grown our presence significantly, expanding our teams across business and various functions, opening new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru, and continuing growth in our Pune Center of Excellence, the only one of its kind in the APJ region. Today, the Snowflake AI Data Cloud empowers enterprises across BFSI, SMEs, manufacturing, logistics, retail and digital natives to collaborate with data, build applications and innovate faster by eliminating silos and simplifying architectures, making it one of the secure, flexible and trusted platforms for customers. We have seen strong adoption of our platform with customers like IndiGo, Dezerv, Deepak Fertilisers, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, Razorpay, Shiprocket and Godrej Capital. We have also grown our partner ecosystem in India, with 50 per cent of Snowflake's APJ partner ecosystem rooted in India. 

Q: Can you go into details about the customers you're working with?

VR: We work with customers across digital natives, SMEs, and some of the largest enterprises in India, and you can imagine the Data and AI scale opportunity in a country that's truly on a growth path. Take Swiggy, for example, one of our oldest customers. They serve millions of people every day, and use Snowflake as part of their modern data platform to manage and process massive volumes of data, especially for real-time business monitoring and analytics.

Another powerful example is Grow Indigo, where AI is driving impact at the grassroots level. Before Snowflake, their BI reporting took nearly 100 hours a month, and real-time analytics were limited. Today, they've cut report generation time to near instant, with an aim to reduce farmer enrollment time by 30 per cent. They have centralised their data for real-time insights, eliminated costly replicas, and now run AI-powered document processing and queries on a scalable platform that supports their carbon program expansion.

Shiprocket is leveraging the Snowflake AI Data Cloud platform to empower over 1.5 lakh MSME merchants and sellers to scale their data infrastructure.

Q: Will AI take over jobs, or will it help create more? How do you see AI taking or helping create jobs over the next five years? 

VR: There's concern about AI leading to job losses; however, I believe AI will enhance work, not replace it. In fact, over the next five years, we'll see AI making data professionals more valuable than ever. With agentic AI, repetitive tasks like data cleaning, boilerplate feature engineering or model tuning will increasingly be automated. This will free data scientists and analysts to focus on higher-value work: asking the right business questions, designing innovative solutions, and interpreting results with real business context. In other words, they'll spend less time on the "how" and more time on the "why" and "what if." At Snowflake, we are empowering students and working professionals to solve a higher class of problems, making their expertise more critical, not less. 

To this extent, we are working towards ensuring the workforce is ready for this shift and recently announced a collaboration with NASSCOM FutureSkills Prime to launch six free learning programs to make India a true Digital Talent Nation. Over the next two years, this initiative will train 100,000 professionals and students in entry-level data and AI skills.

Q: How is the Indian market contributing to Snowflake's global growth strategy?

VR: India is a vast and diverse market and is a growth engine for Snowflake's global strategy. If you look at the world of data in India, we have a lot of headroom to expand. As a cornerstone of India's "Viksit Bharat @ 2047" vision, technology and AI are pivotal to the nation's aspiration of becoming a $23–$35 trillion economy. With a projected need for one million AI professionals by 2026 and AI's potential to add $1 trillion to the economy by 2035, our strategy is to empower this growth.

We see opportunities across both commercial businesses catering to Digital Natives and SMEs and enterprise segments focused on large organisations, which is why we've designed a distinct go-to-market strategy for each. Over the past five years, we've expanded our partner ecosystem significantly, working closely with major advisory firms, system integrators and global innovation service providers to ensure nationwide coverage. 

Furthermore, AI is reshaping the global industries, and for India to lead this transformation, our youth must be at the forefront of this AI revolution with a focus on data literacy, continuous learning and innovation, which are key to thriving in an AI, data-driven world. At Snowflake, we are committed to investing in skilling in India for the world. I truly believe that Indian developers are at the forefront of leading AI innovations for the world.

Q: What specific investments has Snowflake made in India in terms of talent, technology and partnerships? 

VR: Snowflake has made significant investments in India across talent, technology, partnerships and skilling as the market is central to our global strategy. We believe the opportunity is enormous, as Indian organisations leverage Data and AI to drive their digital transformation. We are helping customers by bringing AI to the data.

We will continue to expand our talent base and aim to have over 700 employees by the end of 2025. These hirings will be across sales, operations, solutions engineering, marketing and our Pune Center of Excellence. At Snowflake, we recognise that our success is closely linked to the growth and success of our partner ecosystem. Our network spans advisory leaders like Deloitte and EY, global system integrators such as LTIMindtree and TCS, regional players like Quantiphi, Lumiq, Hoonartek, Kasmo, Rapyder, SaasWorx and BluePi, as well as hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft. These partnerships are focused on acquiring new customers, driving consumption of our platform, and unlocking value through innovation. 

For us, the India story is still relatively new, but it's growing rapidly, and we see this momentum continuing for many more years to come.