As artificial intelligence reshapes the advertising industry, data security and insight delivery have become mission-critical.

At Merkle, a Dentsu company, Snowflake Inc.’s AI-powered data platform is helping marketers analyze customer motivations and behaviors without compromising on governance or speed.

Snowflake’s Artin Avanes and Merkle’s Gerry Bavaro discuss Snowflake’s new AI tools.

“Knowing customers, knowing prospects, that’s what marketing and advertising is all about, and [then] … connecting it with the experience,” said Gerry Bavaro (pictured, left), chief strategy officer, Merkury, at Merkle. “Snowflake has really helped us to have one consistent infrastructure. Our clients today with regulatory and privacy, they don’t like to share files back and forth, so what Snowflake has helped us with is zero copy, zero share.”

Bavaro and Artin Avanes (pictured, right), head of core data platform at Snowflake, spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Snowflake’s services support Merkle’s business. (* Disclosure below.)

Advertising runs on data

At its annual event, Snowflake announced a series of AI capabilities designed to change how users interact with their data. These include features that enable users to query in natural language and across diverse data types, all within Snowflake’s ecosystem, according to Avanes.

“Everyone is rising towards AI,” Avanes said. “Everyone wants to use Cortex … but you want to do it in a secure and governed fashion. Security and governance are paramount and the prerequisite. If you don’t have those in place, the right controls and they apply also to the AI applications that you’re building, you will fail as an organization.”

Security remains a top concern for Merkle’s clients, many of whom prefer not to transfer their data unless absolutely necessary. Merkury, an identity and consumer data platform, can now operate within each client’s Snowflake environment, using its tools to analyze critical marketing data without moving it.

“The golden thread of any agency business in marketing or media and customer experience is, you have to understand from the data what the insights are pointing you towards,” Bavaro said. “What we’re using Cortex for is the unstructured data. These are things about motivations, culture. Context, why did somebody buy? And we see that’s what’s driving up the compute.”

Merkury’s clients have also benefited from Snowflake’s composable ecosystem, which allows users to bring in proprietary models. As the data giant looks toward the future, it will continue to keep interoperable models and open formats on the table, according to Avanes.

“We want to ensure the same Snowflake experience,” he said. “It cannot be that the experience on Iceberg will be different than on regular Snowflake data that sits inside Snowflake. Because our philosophy is, if we embrace these new open formats, whether it’s the data formats or the catalogs, we want to ensure the same exact experience.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Snowflake Summit. Neither Snowflake Inc., the primary sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE