Gen AI in Action: Customers’ Cortex AI Stories and Outcomes Across Industries

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 are using generative AI to deliver new insights — and revenue streams. But what does that look like in practice? 

We’ve built some of the most 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.

Alberta Health Services ER doctors automate note-taking to treat 15% more patients

The integrated health system of Alberta, Canada’s third-most-populous province, with 4.5 million residents, includes more than 100 hospitals and 11,000 practicing physicians. Its emergency departments get nearly 2 million visits per year, which amounts to more than 5,000 a day. That type of volume can easily put a strain on the doctors, who not only serve the patients but also need to document each visit carefully — from summaries to diagnoses to medication orders. 

One such physician, also a trained software engineer, sought a way to automate his note-taking tasks by recording visits and calling an LLM to generate a summary. Seeing the potential of this use case, Alberta Health Services turned to Cortex AI to develop and run the app all within Snowflake’s secure, fully governed environment. The app — which consists of recording patient interactions, transcribing and then summarizing them, all within Snowflake’s secure perimeter — has enabled doctors to spend more time in front of patients and less time in front of a computer. 

Currently in its proof-of-concept phase, it’s being used by a handful of emergency department physicians, who are reporting a 10%-15% increase in the number of patients seen per hour. That can ultimately translate into less-crowded waiting rooms, relief from overwhelming amounts of paperwork for doctors, even better-quality notes and higher-quality patient care. It also generates empathetic, lengthier discharge summaries, which significantly improve the patient experience.

“This is a transformational change,” says Jason Scarlett, Executive Director of Enterprise Data Engineering at Alberta Health Services. “You can begin to recognize that this technology, built with Cortex AI, can even start driving care, including suggesting and creating orders. There’s a very bright future for this type of tool to foundationally change medicine, and it already is in some areas.”

Advisor360 built an automated customer satisfaction pipeline to gauge customer satisfaction in just a matter of days 

For Advisor360°, customer feedback is as essential as it is constant. Supporting financial advisors and wealth managers in nearly all aspects of their jobs, the company’s integrated and configurable SaaS platform informs business decisions, improves client service and even drives innovation for firms. But getting a handle on all the emails, calls and support tickets had historically been a tedious and largely manual process. 

To address that, the Advisor360° analytics and insights team built a sentiment model from scratch, using highly specialized, Python-heavy code that would extract data and push it out to a file, then incorporate it into a dashboard. But, of course, the model required constant maintenance and updating. When senior executives asked for insights using the most up-to-date data, they’d often have to wait the better part of a day to get answers. After migrating all of its historical feedback data to Snowflake, however, Advisor360° created an automated pipeline using Cortex AI to cover that end-to-end process of gauging customer sentiment. Advisor360°’s Director of Analytics and Advanced Insights, Mark Coleman, hoped the team could establish the pipeline within a matter of weeks. 

They had it finished by day 2. 

“Our customer sentiment pipeline is working extremely well,” Coleman says. “It’s integrated directly into Snowflake so we can call it as part of any of our data flows, which makes life really easy. Cortex is doing a great job for us.”

Now, processing feedback occurs automatically every morning, and Coleman estimates that it saves at least a day’s worth of work per month for a senior data scientist. What’s more, the company found that using Cortex AI’s built-in sentiment analysis functionality was about 1/25th the cost of the alternative, which would require using specialized virtual machines and calling in a much larger and pricier LLM to do essentially the same thing. 

"When our data scientists tried to create this pipeline using native Azure tools, it probably took a solid month to figure out how to get permissions right and get through our firewall. We had to get the plumbing to work before we turned the water on,” Coleman says. “But Cortex AI worked out of the box, integrating into our system seamlessly and translating into huge productivity gains for the team."

Now Advisor360° has instant access to the most up-to-date customer insights — allowing the firm to provide the enterprise-class customer care it is known for.

Realizing a gen AI future for all

These are just a couple 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, Snowflake’s unified AI and data platform can help build enterprise-grade gen AI applications. 

To discover how other companies, like 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.”