Data cloud company Snowflake is banking on the accelerated AI adoption by Indian enterprises as it looks to scale operations in the country in 2026. With India ranking among the top three markets globally in terms of confidence in AI adoption, the company is aligning its strategy to this momentum, prioritising cloud migration, enterprise AI deployment, and ecosystem expansion to drive the next phase of growth, managing director – India, Vijayant Rai told FE.
Snowflake is a cloud-based platform that helps companies store, organise, and analyse their data — and increasingly use that data to run AI applications.
This builds on a year of strong expansion in 2025. Snowflake significantly scaled its go-to-market operations, nearly doubling its teams in India too 700 employees, widening coverage across sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, and retail.
“We were looking to expand and serve Indian customers in a far more cohesive manner. We doubled our go-to-market teams and opened new offices in Mumba and Bangalore as part of our expansion,” Rai said.
For 2026, Snowflake’s strategy is centred on driving greater data migration to the cloud. A large proportion of enterprise data in India continues to reside on-premise, and the company sees this as a structural opportunity. Moving data to the cloud is positioned as a prerequisite for unlocking value from analytics and AI, particularly as enterprises look to unify fragmented data environments.
From Pilot to Production
AI adoption forms the second pillar of growth. The company is seeing a shift from pilot projects to production-level deployments, with AI-led consumption beginning to contribute alongside traditional data workloads.
“Of the 13,300 customers, 9,100 are already using AI on the Snowflake platform and that is massive acceleration,” Rai said adding that the Indian customer base follows a similar trend.
Snowflake is enabling this through offerings that allow both business users and developers to build AI-driven workflows while keeping data, models, and governance within a single platform. This reflects a broader shift, Rai indicated, from experimentation towards measurable outcomes and ROI-led adoption.
A global survey by the company reinforced this trend. Based on responses from over 2,000 participants, about a third of organisations already have AI use cases in production, while another third expect to reach that stage within the next 12 months. Adoption is increasingly being evaluated through tangible returns and the use of agentic workflows, rather than early-stage experimentation.
Scaling the Ecosystem
The third element of Snowflake’s strategy is ecosystem expansion. The company is investing in partnerships across consulting firms, system integrators, and specialised AI players, while also building a base of independent software vendors developing solutions on its platform.
“We run one of the largest partner ecosystems for APJ from India. It is a combination of us, our partners and the customer to deliver the evolving AI space,” Rai said.
This three-way model—platform, partner, and customer—is central to driving adoption at scale.