Wall Street Grilled This CEO on Whether AI Growth Is Real or Just Hype — Here’s What He Said as the Stock Popped 23%

Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) was upbeat about agentic AI driving growth for the company but stopped short of revealing the exact percentage or dollar uplift numbers for customers adopting AI.

When asked about what the consumption uplift is for AI adopters relative to comparable non-adopters, CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said, on the company’s fiscal second-quarter earnings call, that, “At this time we aren’t ready to share the exact uplift numbers, but we do measure cohort behavior.”

AI has become the talk of the town since OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022. Since then, AI has come a long way, with AI agents now being introduced in workflows across organizations. However, with AI’s adoption, questions about the rising cost of using AI and the returns it generates for organizations have also popped up.

Ramaswamy went on to say that “what gives us confidence that this is not merely projects being pulled forward is both the breadth and depth of use cases that are coming our way.”

Snowflake’s Stellar Earnings Boost Stock

On Wednesday, Snowflake reported its fiscal second-quarter results, with revenue at $1.55 billion, beating analyst estimates of $1.48 billion, according to Benzinga Pro. The AI data cloud company saw adjusted earnings of 62 cents per share for the quarter, beating estimates of 45 cents per share. SNOW stock surged about 23% after-hours.

On the call, management touted its agentic AI products, Cowork and Coco, noting that they are seeing rapid adoption.

“Cowork expanded to 5,800 accounts, up nearly 11% quarter over quarter. Meanwhile, Coco continues to see rapid adoption, surpassing 9,100 accounts and adding more than 2,000 net new accounts in this quarter alone,” said Ramaswamy.

Debate on AI Models Cost and Impact on Software Stocks Continues

Separately, Ramaswamy also said that as AI models have gotten more powerful, “cost has absolutely become a concern.”

In the past year, some software stocks have been under pressure because of concerns over their obsolescence after advanced AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI showed up with coding and other abilities.

“I mean, the way I think about this is that as software gets easier and easier to create, it’s the data and semantics that acquire more and more importance,” said Ramaswamy on the call.

However, Snowflake’s stock seemed to have benefited, growing about 39% year-to-date.

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