Snowflake's CMO says trust is the key to AI adoption

Snowflake Chief Marketing Officer Denise Persson told attendees at the Cannes Lions festival this week that the hardest part of the AI rollout inside most companies is not the technology. It is the organizational structure.

"The big topic is how do we build this new AI operating model across the organization," Persson said in remarks published Thursday.

For Snowflake, the comment lands inside a specific business problem. The company sells a data cloud that enterprises use to store the structured data that powers AI models. Today, most of those buying decisions come from IT and engineering teams. If marketing chiefs cannot embed AI into their own workflows, the data sitting in Snowflake's warehouses gets queried only by a narrow set of technical users. Revenue from each account stays capped.

Persson argued that the way around that ceiling is internal credibility accumulated over time.

"The greatest asset you have as a CMO is the trust that you have built in your organization," she said. "It's the same thing for brands and their customers – trust is the most important brand asset."

Trust lets a CMO push through a cross-department change that a top-down IT mandate might not carry. In Snowflake's case, a CMO who wins that organizational bet becomes an internal sponsor for broader data usage, which drives more compute and storage consumption on the platform.

The challenge is that Snowflake does not sit alone in the enterprise AI stack. Companies like Salesforce and Adobe own the campaign-management applications that marketing teams already use. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud offer competing data warehouses that can store the same structured data. A CMO who buys an AI tool inside Salesforce or Adobe never sees Snowflake's name. Snowflake wins only when those third-party tools run on its warehouse, or when the client builds custom models that demand more raw data than a packaged application provides.

Persson's appearance at Cannes – a marketing industry event, not a tech conference – signals that Snowflake is trying to make its case directly to the departmental buyer, not waiting for the conversation to filter down from the CIO. The bet is that the organizational barrier matters more than the technical one.

"Trust is the most important brand asset," Persson said.