Snowflake Startup Spotlight: Lang.AI

Welcome to Snowflake’s Startup Spotlight, where we ask startup founders about the problems they’re solving, the apps they’re building and the lessons they’ve learned during their startup journey. In this edition, meet the co-founders of Lang.AI and see how AI has shaped both their product and their company’s culture of continuous experimentation.

Tell us about yourselves. 

We are Jorge and Enrique, the founders of Lang.AI. This is actually the second company we have started together. The first one was a social media analytics platform for the Spanish-speaking market, which was based in Spain and expanded to Latin America. We scaled the company to 40 employees and had leading enterprise customers in the region.

We decided to take the leap and start our second company, Lang.AI, in San Francisco, betting on the potential of AI and the concentration of customers in the U.S.

What inspires you as founders?

For the past 12 years, we've been driven by the challenge of turning unstructured data into valuable enterprise insights. This task requires a blend of advanced algorithms and a user-friendly interface to make it accessible for business users. Our daily motivation comes from simplifying our customers' lives and enabling them to achieve things they couldn't otherwise. We believe our work can unlock one of the biggest opportunities in leveraging unstructured data for business value, a potential that has grown significantly with the advancements in generative AI.

What problem does your company aim to solve, and how did you identify that issue?

As communication shifted into digital channels, it created a treasure trove of data that many companies haven’t really tapped into yet: what their customers are saying. We identified this problem through our experience with the massive amount of unstructured data businesses have to deal with, which often leads to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Our company aims to unlock the value of qualitative data with AI. We create AI agents on Snowflake for product managers. 

How has the changing nature of AI impacted your startup? 

AI has fundamentally reshaped our direction and strategy. We started Lang.AI with a vision to leverage the vast amounts of unstructured data generated by digital platforms to help organizations make better decisions. Initially, we focused on consumer organizations, partnering with Zendesk to tag and categorize conversations, driving insights from unstructured data to empower customer experience (CX) teams.

However, the advent of generative AI has revolutionized our approach. Generative AI transforms hours of decision-making into immediate, data-backed insights, prompting us to rethink our strategy from a first principles approach. The CX space has become increasingly cost focused, with Zendesk aiming to dominate without partnering with AI companies. This challenged our initial assumption of transforming CX into a revenue driver.

Recognizing the broader impact of AI beyond cost reduction, we pivoted our focus from CX to developing AI agents for product managers on top of Snowflake. This shift has allowed us to maintain the focus on our vision and focus on building the AI agents that show the impact that the analysis of this data can have in an organization. Our agents serve meaningful product recommendations — with context — directly in Slack. Our solution seamlessly integrates with your data in Snowflake so data teams can build and deploy these AI-powered analytics agents for business teams without the need for complex setup or AI expertise.

Internally, we have embraced a culture of continuous experimentation, and every employee is leveraging OpenAI and/or Anthropic as part of their work. We believe that in order to succeed with the right experiments, our team has to be pushing the limits of AI as well.

How have Snowflake Native Apps enabled you to push the envelope in your line of business?

The Snowflake Native App Framework has become the core of our strategic approach. It allowed us to overcome several key challenges when working with customer experience data in the enterprise:

• Missing context: Traditionally, CX data has lacked context, making it difficult to derive meaningful insights when analyzed in isolation because it’s only one piece of the puzzle.

• Insights that are far from revenue outcomes: It has been challenging to connect CX insights to tangible business outcomes such as revenue and retention, as that data isn’t available outside of the data warehouse.

• Adoption of a new platform: Product managers often face difficulties in adopting new platforms and prefer insights to be integrated into the tools they already use.

With Snowflake, we can provide a comprehensive and scalable data platform that addresses these challenges head-on and drives measurable business impact for our customers:

• Access to complete context: Because Snowflake enables consolidation of data sources, we can now access all relevant data sources and provide the full context needed for meaningful analysis. This comprehensive data view was previously impossible to achieve.

• Connection between insights and outcomes: The Snowflake Native App Framework allows us to directly link CX data to specific business outcomes, such as revenue and retention, that may be in other Snowflake tables. By analyzing relevant customer interactions and connecting them to the user spend or actions, our AI agents can identify key insights and translate them into actionable recommendations that drive business impact.

• Seamless integration into existing tools: With Snowflake Native Apps, we can embed our AI solutions directly into the tools that product managers are already using. Slack is a common example, but we can even serve an interface inside Snowflake for read access.

There’s also the fact that the Snowflake Native App Framework streamlines deployment. In the new era of AI, demonstrating value quickly is paramount, so fast and simplified sales cycles are paramount to success. The most important thing is to show value, and this can only be achieved by deploying solutions rapidly without getting bogged down by security or legal delays. Snowflake Native Apps allow us to leverage Snowflake’s existing customer relationships and infrastructure, enabling our customers to purchase our apps using their existing Snowflake spend.

What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs considering building their apps on Snowflake?

Focus on one ecosystem, and if it’s Snowflake, go all in. Otherwise, it won’t work as your resources will be spread too thin. And don’t be afraid to ask questions when you hit a roadblock. 

As founders and innovators, what do you think about the rapidly changing AI landscape? 

We’re both excited and concerned. Excited because AI is opening a world of potential to the most creative people anywhere in the world. Not knowing how to code or how to speak English won’t be a barrier soon. People with the highest creativity will be able to innovate and build products without being conditioned by their environment.

Concerned because a lot of work that’s mostly executional and doesn’t require creativity will be automated, and that’s going to displace a huge number of people — something we believe most of the world isn’t fully aware of yet.

All AI/ML innovations are exciting as long as they are used properly. These days it’s difficult to point out a specific innovation, as things are changing very rapidly, but we are most excited about the evolution of how we work and live during an era where the way we interact with computers is changing radically. That’s the most valuable aspect of AI: thinking about problems that couldn’t be solved before because it took so much time or resources — and now they can be solved.

The critical ability to thrive in this new AI world is adaptability. When everything changes so fast, being able to learn and adapt is the single ingredient to be able to be successful as a professional and as a company.

Finally, what's the most valuable piece of advice you got about how to run a startup? 

Don’t make (or avoid) decisions out of fear. What makes startups win is being bold, not being average. So the best decisions are made out of confidence in your intuition. Kim Lecha, CEO of Typeform, gave us that advice.

Learn more about enhancing customer experience with AI workflows at lang.ai, try the Lang.ai app on Snowflake Marketplace or read the company’s post on the Snowflake Builder Blog on Medium for technical details. If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, check out the Powered by Snowflake Startup Program for info on how Snowflake can support your goals.