Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) has announced that Frank Slootman is retiring from his role as Chief Executive Officer, and Sridhar Ramaswamy, formerly Senior Vice President of AI at Snowflake, has been appointed as the new CEO and a member of the Board of Directors with immediate effect. Slootman expressed confidence in Ramaswamy’s ability to lead Snowflake into the next phase of growth, particularly in the realms of AI and machine learning.

Ramaswamy, who joined Snowflake in May 2023 through the acquisition of Neeva, a private AI-powered search engine, has been instrumental in spearheading Snowflake’s AI strategy. His notable achievements include leading the launch of Snowflake Cortex, a fully managed service aimed at simplifying and securing AI for users to drive business value efficiently.

Before his tenure at Snowflake, Ramaswamy co-founded Neeva in 2019. Prior to that, he played a crucial role at Google, overseeing all of Google’s Advertising products for 15 years, contributing significantly to the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion.

Ramaswamy’s extensive experience also includes research positions at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). He served as a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners until recently and is a trustee on the board of Brown University.

Slootman, in his departure, commended the team for establishing Snowflake as the leading cloud data platform over the past 12 years, providing secure, scalable, and cost-effective data solutions along with cutting-edge AI capabilities. Ramaswamy expressed his honor in leading Snowflake through its next phase of growth, focusing on accelerating innovation for customers and partners in the AI space.