Gen AI in Action: Customers Use Cortex AI to Garner New Insights and Accelerate Innovation

For years, companies have operated under the prevailing notion that AI is reserved only for the corporate giants — the ones with the resources to make it work for them. But as technology speeds forward, organizations of all sizes are realizing that generative AI isn’t just aspirational; it’s accessible and applicable now.

With Snowflake’s easy-to-use, unified AI and data platform, businesses are removing the manual drudgery, bottlenecks and error-prone labor that stymie productivity, and they are using generative AI to deliver new insights — and revenue streams. But what does that look like in practice?  

We’ve gathered some innovative generative AI solutions that our customers are using in production today. Their stories demonstrate how Snowflake and Cortex AI are putting gen AI goals within reach and driving business value along the way.

Johnnie-O improves accuracy of geocoding address data to better serve customers

Like many largely ecommerce businesses, the East-Coast-prep-meets-West-Coast-casual clothing brand Johnnie-O understands the value in a simple shipping address. Just a few lines of text can provide powerful demographic insights into the company’s customers when linked to data from the U.S. Census Bureau — information like average household income in the area, percentage of people with degrees, employment rates, races and ethnicities and so on. By using this data not only directly from website orders but from wholesalers and dropshippers, Johnnie-O can begin to understand its customer base better and consequently target its marketing efforts more effectively. 

But the company had one problem: A significant number of collected addresses could not be geocoded, preventing the team from accessing relevant customer data. Typically, the company runs raw address data through an application that delivers geographic coordinates, which then makes it easy to link to census data. But for Johnnie-O, many of these addresses failed for a variety of reasons, which could be as small as a typo or information in the wrong field. So instead of manually cleaning up these hundreds of thousands of data points, the company looked to Cortex AI to automatically reformat the messy address data. After feeding these incorrect addresses into Cortex AI using a Llama LLM, Johnnie-O immediately slashed its failure rate to just 2%. 

Now the company can run its market segmentation algorithms with confidence, knowing there are no significant holes in the data powering them. And to make this feat even more impressive, it was essentially built by just one person: Johnnie-O’s Analytics Engineer, Ricardo Lopez. “Cortex AI is so easy to use and implement, especially because all of our data is already in Snowflake,” he says. “Snowflake and Cortex AI have become the center of everything for us.”

Using Cortex AI, healthcare staffing agency IntelyCare is confident that job postings are no longer falling through the cracks 

Staffing jobs in healthcare is critical to a well-functioning medical system; it is also becoming increasingly complex, as many states anticipate facing nursing shortages in coming years. IntelyCare provides a comprehensive platform that helps match healthcare organizations with qualified nursing professionals for open positions, whether they be permanent roles, travel assignments or per diem shifts. With hundreds of thousands of open positions nationwide at any given time, the task of filling those roles begins with organizing job postings. 

While IntelyCare has direct relationships with many organizations, many of the largest healthcare systems prefer to post openings through a vendor management system (VMS), which can be accessed only by vetted agencies like IntelyCare. To be able to include these opportunities in its database and app, however, IntelyCare must process each post in a way that is organized and relatively uniform. That, of course, presents a challenge, given that each VMS adheres to its own system of standard practices. It’s not uncommon for fields to be left blank on some posts or for bodies of text to be unintelligible to IntelyCare’s internal tools; as a result, more than 30% of job posts were getting lost in processing. 

So IntelyCare began using LLMs in Cortex AI to quickly extract pertinent information, both simple and complex, from these thousands of posts: specialty, pay range, specialized years of experience required, whether local applicants can apply for travel positions and so on. Then IntelyCare can organize the posts in thoughtful ways and without fear of losing opportunities because of, say, incompatible formatting. “We’ve basically pushed that 30% of lost job posts down to zero,” says IntelyCare’s VP of Data Science, Benjamin Tengelsen. Not only has that enhanced the user experience for applicants, but it’s also lightened the burden on IntelyCare’s recruiters, who would tirelessly sift through individual postings to find the best matches for their candidates. 

Similarly, Cortex AI also helps Intelycare manage and process the constant stream of postings it fetches from public job boards. The team, for instance, had built elaborate pipelines to appropriately add tags to jobs for easy categorization; adding a new tag would require building and training new models, complex orchestration and frequent maintenance. “We can now replace thousands of lines of mangled Python code with a single Cortex query — all while delivering an improved customer experience,” Tengelsen says.

Realizing a gen AI future for all

These are just a few of the promising ways organizations across industries are moving their gen AI apps to production today. And with Snowflake’s built-in security and governance, bringing AI securely into your workflow has never been easier. Whether it is using Document AI or Cortex Search, Snowflake Copilot or Cortex Analyst (in public preview), Snowflake’s unified AI and data platform can help build enterprise-grade gen AI applications. 

To discover how other companies, such as Bayer and Siemens Energy, are using gen AI to increase revenue, improve productivity and better serve their customers, download Snowflake’s customer success ebook “Secrets of Gen AI Success.”