Snow Software launches Snow Copilot, its first AI assistant for ITAM and FinOps

ITAM News & Analysis

Snow Software launches Snow Copilot, its first AI assistant for ITAM and FinOps

27 November 2023

4 minute read

Snow Software has unveiled Snow Copilot, the first-in-a-series of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities designed to solve large challenges in IT Asset Management (ITAM) and FinOps. Developed in its innovation incubator Snow Labs, Snow Copilot is an AI assistant that empowers users to ask conversational questions and receive natural language responses.

Snow Copilot is initially available for Software Asset Management (SAM) computer data in Snow Atlas, however more use cases will be delivered over time.

Snow Labs

Snow Copilot is the first project to come out of Snow Labs, the company’s skunkworks-esque initiative tasked with creating new products out of emerging technologies.

Steve Tait, Chief Technology Officer and EVP, Research and Development at Snow stated, “We created Snow Labs as a space for rapid experimentation and prototyping, allowing us to test emerging technologies that sat outside of our standard product roadmap. Artificial intelligence is a great example of a rapidly evolving, emerging technology that could allow Snow Labs to address a myriad of challenges our customers face when making sense of their technology asset data. We believe that AI will fundamentally transform the way our customers and partners interact with their data. This is just one of many ways we are working to bring our vision around Technology Intelligence to life through innovation.”

Solving ITAM and FinOps challenges with AI

Snow Copilot is stated to be the first of AI assistant developed to solve advanced challenges for ITAM and FinOps, and leverages the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. It allows customers to input questions and receive insights on their computer data, such as “How many computers have been installed in the last 90 days?,” as well as explore “what if” scenarios all directly within Snow Atlas. Snow Copilot reduces the need to export data into PowerBI or Excel to get insights into advanced questions on forecasting, asset allocation, and trend identification of SAM computer data. All data remains secure in the customer environment ensuring data privacy and integrity.

ITAM Review analysis

It is welcome to see AI gaining a meaningful foothold in ITAM with these developments. Snow’s announcement follows a similar announcement by Torii, when the company announced its own AI assistant “Ask Torii” back in September. With “Integrating AI” ranking as the No 1 priority for IT decision makers in the last year, according to Snow’s own IT Priorities Report 2023, we can expect to see many more innovative uses for AI in this sector over the coming months and years. Let’s just hope vendors don’t suffer from Shiny Penny Syndrome and begin to neglect their core products in the pursuit of the next big thing; a recent straw poll of our audience found that 50% of you were concerned that ITAM vendors were focusing too much on the next big thing at the expense of their core SAM functionality, and that this was a problem. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t? Watch this space for more AI news! There’s going to be lots of it.

Snow Software launches Snow Copilot, its first AI assistant for ITAM and FinOps