Driving Real Business Value from AI: Value-Focused Data Leaders to Watch in 2025

As organizations mature in their execution of data and AI initiatives, a burning question remains: How do we measure the effectiveness of our teams and our impact on the business? This isn’t the perennial “What’s my data worth?” dilemma often asked rhetorically and answered theoretically. Today’s challenge is concrete: to define and track the metrics used to justify continued investment in data and AI innovation. Data teams often begin with measuring throughput and speed to insights or governance and risk mitigation. These are sometimes considered “foundational metrics.” But the holy grail of true transformation is the measurement of business values and attribution to the data and AI initiatives. 

In fact, according to analyst firms, measuring and reporting AI value was a top barrier to implementing AI initiatives. Some CDOs allow experimentation without a full business case; however, putting an AI model into production most often requires a clear picture of the return. 

The struggle to measure business value has been in the headlines lately. Investors worry about an AI bubble: Can growth among AI vendors continue, and can customers sustain their rates of investment? “[W]e question how it is going to work and whether it will generate sufficient return on capital,” worries one industry analyst. That remains the question du jour: “Is all of this actually worth anything?” We know it is. Many of our Snowflake customers are proving it.

Bottom line: It will be up to data and AI leaders to deliver and measure the business impact of their AI initiatives and the underlying data. Many already are. 

The effort and impact of these leaders shouldn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated, so Snowflake is thrilled to announce our Value-Focused Data and AI Leaders to Watch list. To help spotlight the contributions of these leaders, Snowflake has identified 50 individuals who deliver value to their organizations and have established processes to monitor and measure the impact on the business systematically. 

While it’s not a comprehensive list of the CDOs Snowflake believes are driving change within their organizations, we want to highlight a few who embody the qualities we consider critical to success. These leaders are progressive thinkers who have demonstrated the agility required to adapt to the fast-moving innovation around data and AI and recognize the imperative of delivering business value. 

The following individuals have established mechanisms to measure and monitor the business value derived from innovation and investments in data and AI.