Unlocking the Potential of Technology Data With Snow Labs and Artificial Intelligence
The impact of generative AI on the 2023 IT landscape has been completely transformative. Large Language Models (LLM) took a giant leap into the mainstream and at the end of 2023 we know they will change IT forever. The utility of this technology for increasing productivity, reducing costs, and increasing operational efficiency is undeniable. All areas that are top priorities for most IT leaders today can improve with generative AI.
At Snow Software, we have long pioneered solutions that enable organizations to identify and take advantage of cost savings, mitigate risk, and drive innovation forward. That’s why we are excited to preview Snow Copilot, our first AI-enabled assistant designed to help tackle the biggest challenges facing IT Asset Management (ITAM) and FinOps practices. This is a major milestone for our innovation initiatives running at Snow Labs.
Let’s walk through Snow Copilot, Snow Labs’ vision, its groundbreaking offerings, and more insights into this exciting new chapter at Snow.
The need for Snow Labs
If you’re not already aware, Snow Labs is an innovation incubator that brings together Snow customers and product experts to address the evolving challenges faced by organizations today, and solved by Technology Intelligence (the ability to understand and manage all technology).
This gives us an opportunity to investigate the most complex problems our customers face and utilize the changing technology landscape to find potential solutions. While Snow already drives innovation within its standard product roadmap, an innovation incubator like Snow Labs empowers us to advance in areas outside our roadmap. These include:
- Moving beyond “safe” innovation where we have a good handle on viability and feasibility and trialing higher risk and more uncertain solutions and technologies
- Explicitly investing in taking risks to create new and innovative solutions for our customers and partners
- Functioning outside Snow standard structured Engineering and Product Development processes to quickly create prototypes, Minimum Viable Products (MVP), and test new capabilities before they are moved into the main portfolio
- Gathering customer feedback at MVP stages to create the ability to fail quickly or to advance products into production
For the past 25 years, Snow has been on a mission to provide strategic insights and drive positive business outcomes from technology asset data. Snow Labs is the next step in our journey, aimed at fostering experimentation and rapid prototyping with transformative technologies like generative AI, which help our customers harness their data effectively.
Snow Labs innovating with AI
Organizations are constantly inundated with vast amounts of data, but IT leaders struggle to make sense of it and act upon it effectively. Despite advancements in self-service dashboards and APIs, many technologies fail to integrate essential data silos across the organization. This integration challenge is one reason why senior decision-makers continue to report difficulties in gaining complete visibility over their entire IT estate.
Using generative AI capabilities, our Snow Labs team looked at how we could:
- Democratize data insights
- Lower the barriers to accessing valuable information
- Provide a better understanding of technology asset data
- Categorize data for context
- Offer fine-tuned, real-world recommendations based on proprietary data
The first of these capabilities is Snow Copilot, an AI assistant, currently in beta, that at launch will allow customers to query their details on Software Asset Management (SAM) computer data securely, receiving insights and conversational responses directly within the Snow Atlas platform. Snow Copilot leverages Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service for generating responses. We know security is at the forefront of our customers’ minds, and with Snow Copilot, your data stays securely within your own environment, ensuring data privacy and integrity.
We specifically chose the name Copilot because it means an assistant that works alongside you, a term that originated from the aviation industry. In AI, copilot is being adopted more to understand data, handle tasks like writing or coding, and add context in “natural language”. An AI assistant can help advance IT stakeholders’ understanding around technology asset data, particularly those without technical expertise.
Snow Copilot makes it possible to chat with your data. You ask questions and Snow Copilot delivers the answer in natural language removing the need for you to export the computer data set into PowerBI or Excel then formulating an answer yourself or scouring through hundreds of rows within our data set.
Other upcoming AI-powered capabilities from Snow Labs include:
- Machine Learning Entitlement Ingestion Service: This service will simplify software entitlement uploads with automated invoice processing powered by machine learning, making data more comprehensive and improving the insights users gain from Snow Atlas. It addresses a challenging issue where organizations are not uploading invoices and entitlements, thus exposing themselves to licensing and compliance risks.
- Enhanced Data Intelligence Service (DIS) Dataset with OpenAI: This service will augment SaaS descriptions in the Snow DIS with deeper description detail, categories, functions, etc. AI brings substantial data enrichment to existing datasets and provide our customers with transformative insights. This enhancement will lead to greater data accuracy, consistency and normalization.
More advanced experiments from Snow Labs include:
- Fine-Tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on Snow’s proprietary data: Providing customers with personalized licensing recommendations to make more informed decisions regarding their technology assets.
The future of Snow Labs
Snow Labs allows us to move swiftly to bring innovative capabilities to the industry and transform the way businesses interact with their data. The introduction of Snow Copilot and other AI-enabled capabilities will empower IT leaders to make data-driven decisions, maximize their IT investments, and mitigate compliance risks.
Snow Labs’ commitment to democratizing data insights and its pioneering approach to Technology Intelligence ensure that businesses can stay at the cutting edge of innovation. Snow Labs is set to break new ground and our journey is just beginning!
Snow Copilot is available for current Snow Atlas customers who apply for the beta program. You can also ask your Snow Account Manager for more information. Watch Snow Copilot in action and read more details in our press release.