In this NYSE Live interview, Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake, discusses how artificial intelligence, trusted data, and enterprise innovation are reshaping business operations and modern marketing.Persson begins by reflecting on Snowflake’s Startup Challenge and the significance of bringing innovative early-stage companies to the New York Stock Exchange. She describes the NYSE as an inspiring environment for entrepreneurs and founders working toward ambitious long-term goals.A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the common characteristics shared by this year’s finalists. According to Persson, the participating startups are leveraging data and AI to solve unique business challenges while building on the Snowflake platform’s data infrastructure and analytics capabilities.The interview also explores the importance of data governance. Persson argues that AI systems are only as trustworthy as the data they are built upon, making governance, quality, transparency, and security foundational requirements for achieving reliable business outcomes.Another major theme is the impact of AI on marketing organizations. Persson explains that marketers are gaining new capabilities around personalization, audience engagement, workflow automation, and customer experience optimization. At the same time, organizations must navigate increasingly complex data ecosystems while ensuring responsible AI implementation.The conversation further examines Snowflake’s own AI adoption strategy. The company’s marketing team has progressed from experimentation to broad adoption and is now focusing on transformational use cases that drive measurable business value while improving operational efficiency.The interview also highlights how AI is helping creative and marketing teams automate production-intensive tasks. Automating repetitive work allows employees to dedicate more time to strategy, creativity, customer engagement, and innovation.Trust remains another key area of discussion. Persson believes organizations must be transparent about how customer data is used and protected, particularly as AI-powered personalization becomes more prevalent. Strong governance and ethical data practices will play a central role in earning and maintaining consumer trust.Additionally, the conversation explores what remains uniquely human in an AI-powered future. Persson points to creativity, judgment, strategic thinking, customer empathy, and trust-building as areas where human expertise will remain essential even as automation capabilities continue to advance.Looking ahead, Persson expects AI to become an increasingly powerful tool for helping organizations improve decision-making, streamline operations, and create more meaningful customer experiences while empowering employees to focus on higher-order work.Throughout the discussion, Persson shares perspectives on artificial intelligence, data governance, enterprise technology, marketing transformation, customer trust, startup innovation, business intelligence, digital strategy, and the future of AI-powered organizations.Disclaimer: Informational content only. NYSE does not endorse or recommend investments, strategies, companies, products, or services discussed.
Earlier this month, NYSE-listed tech giant Snowflake was here at the exchange to celebrate the finalists from this year’s startup challenge. It’s a contest for early-stage firms building innovative applications and products powered by Snowflake’s AI data cloud. Legend AI, a startup transforming satellite and aerial imagery into searchable data, won the competition, and its leaders rang the closing bell as you see on your screen. Well, I sat down with Snowflake’s Chief Marketing Officer, Denise Pearson, to learn more about what makes the NYSE the perfect place to host this year’s celebration. Let’s take a look.
at the stock exchange. I mean, you’re feeling the ambition in the wall here. I mean, every single legendary company has been through the New York Stock Exchange. So just for these companies to be here. These are really very ambitious companies, but just to be here is such a huge inspiration just for them to think about, you know, this could be my company one day standing on the podium, ringing the open bell for for an IPO for instance. So I think it’s just a really inspiring place to be and kind of helps them, right on that hard work towards their their vision.
What do the top startups in this year’s competition all have in common?
They all have in common that they’re building on data and AI. They’re really all uh pushing the boundaries in terms of what you can do with data and AI. They’re all building on snowflake um infrastructure. So that’s one of the things that they have um in uh in common. They’re all solving unique business, you know, problems. So data is really at the foundation of most applications today, but they’re really helping companies turn data into intelligence and true business outcomes for businesses.
How important is it that this data is governed?
Governance is more important than ever. I mean, we all hear about, you know, AI today that is hallucinating, etc. And again, if you put bad data or low-quality data into an AI model, it’s just going to scale what you put into it, right? So there’s nothing more important than to build AI applications on top of safe data, governed data, data that you can trust. If you trust the data, you’re going to be able to trust the outcome that these incredible models can give you.
How does data and AI specifically play out in your world as a CMO?
Yeah, I mean, AI and data is completely transforming how marketing is being done today. Uh it’s it’s really the best time in history to be in marketing today. Marketing has always been about being incredibly relevant to your customers. It’s about marketing to them or communicating at the right time, etc. And data and AI is really what helps us to do that at scale. At the same time, we really have to be very humble about this transformation marketing is going through. I would say that this transformation is going to of course offer an incredible opportunity to marketing, but it’s also the most challenging time to be in marketing. Uh data is fragmented across so many different systems in marketing, and you really have to bring all that data, bring your uh enterprise context together in order to build this adjunctive, you know, workflows. So, again, incredible opportunity, but again, we have to be humble about what this transformation means to marketers today as well.
How has your own team been an early adopter of AI?
Like many other departments, we’ve been through the different stages. I mean, a couple of years ago, we all started to experimenting, you know, with with data, then we moved into adoption. We essentially have 100% adoption of AI across the snowflake marketing team today. But now we’re really at that phase where we’re really truly looking at what are the most transformative use cases and workloads we should focus on. So of course you want that sort of early efficiency, productivity, but at the same time, you want to identify one or two really hard problem that AI can come in and solve for you. An example of that, uh for many marketing departments, your brand and creative team, they spend so much less time on production, resizing that digital display ad 100 times, right? Very, very time consuming. This is where AI can come in and really help automating some of those workflows that are slowing marketing, you know, down.
How do brands effectively connect with customers and or clients in this AI driven world?
I would say that trust is going to be the currency in marketing between brands and consumers because data is again, the foundation for building these personalized experiences. And we need to have our consumers be willing to share that data with us, so we can again create this experiences for them. And consumers are going to be willing to do that when they trust the brand. So, things like, you know, privacy, being very, very upfront with how you’re using consumers data and not using it for anything else is going to be really essential for brands moving forward.
Moving forward, what does stay distinctly human in marketing amid AI?
I think what’s uh is going to be distinctly human are the things that we love to to to do as humans as well. And especially in marketing, things like really pushing creativity, uh judgment is going to be incredibly important. building trust, get time to spend more time with customers. That’s really hard, especially in B2B. We’re so busy with all the busy work, so we don’t have time to really spend time with our customers. We’re going to get time for the things we always wanted to do. And I think the best thing is to look at this when I if you ask anyone in marketing, do you miss anything that AI is now doing for you, nobody does that, right? AI is taking away the things that we really don’t like about our jobs. So, uh things around creativity, strategy, judgment is going to be very important because humans are going to build the guard rails around these autonomous agents, you know, working for us. So judgment is going to be incredibly important just to make sure that those agents are actually following through on the things that they should and nothing else.
