Informatica CEO: 'Everybody's Ready for AI Except Your Data'

INFORMATICA WORLD — Data management platform provider Informatica just announced what it calls the first generative AI-powered data management assistant.

Customers can use newly launched CLAIRE GPT to embed gen AI into their data management. The CLAIRE copilot is infused into every layer of the Informatica Data Management Cloud (IDMC), processing natural language and giving users advice on how to integrate and manage data.

Informatica announced the engine, as well as enhancements to its partnerships with Snowflake and Microsoft, at its annual Informatica World conference.

Informatica CEO Talks Data

These days it's not surprising to hear conference keynotes that focus on generative AI. Informatica CEO Amit Walia acknowledged both the hype and the potential of the technology in in his opening keynote Tuesday.

Informatica's Amit Walia

"The reality is that the word 'AI' is overused, overhyped — very typical of a new technology trend. From newsroom to the boardroom, it's everywhere. And the headlines range from good to bad — huge risks to huge rewards. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody wants it. But people are struggling to figure out the way to begin and create a defined path to operationalize it," Walia told attendees.

Those struggles stem in large part from shortcomings in data, Walia said. The "inherently fragmented" nature of data, along with issues of model bias and IP infringement, make it difficult for businesses to build a firm foundation for trusted and ethical large language models (LLMs).

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"The challenge is that while everybody is ready for AI – you, your executives, the CEOs, the board members, the investor – there is one big stumbling block. Everybody's ready for AI, except your data," Walia said.

The CLAIRE GPT offering is available first to customers in North America. The vendor noted that it will eventually support unstructured data like documents, images and video.

Snowflake, Microsoft Partnerships

Informatica on Tuesday announced that IDMC is now an Azure Native ISV Service. That means customers can use the Azure Management Console to deploy IDMC. The partnership is in public preview, set to be generally available in the summer.

In addition, users of Microsoft Fabric Native Application will soon be able to use Informatica data profiling and data quality services within the Microsoft Fabric environment. The companies will preview Informatica Data Quality as a Microsoft Fabric Native Application this summer.

Finally, Informatica made Cloud Data Access Management (CDAM) for Azure available earlier this year.

Food service company Sodexo taps Informatica to manage the data it uses for analytics with Azure.

Sodexo's Alice Guehennec

"With Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud, we have been addressing the enterprise data management challenges necessary to drive strong analytics through our Azure platform. With a deeper partnership in place, we look forward to an even more integrated experience for our data practitioners,” said Alice Guehennec, group chief tech and data and digital officer at Sodexo.

Informatica furthermore announced a new Native SQL ELT to support different functions in the Snowflake Data Cloud. Customers use can build ELT (meaning "extract, load, and transform") running on Snowflake compute.

An additional update pairs Snowflake’s Cortex AI gen AI service with data integration, data quality and other key services from Informatica IDMC.