Hex CEO Barry McCardel shares findings from Hex's 2025 State of the Data Teams report: 77% of data leaders are excited about AI, but only 3% prioritize it in production. He discusses Hex's new Snowflake Semantic Views integration and how AI will reshape data roles while human skills like problem-solving remain critical.
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Barry, always a pleasure. Great to be with you here at Snowflake Summit. Just start with, it's been a busy week for you and the Hex team here at Snowflake Summit. You just released your 2025 State of the Data Teams report. Can you walk us through the key findings?
Yeah, so we sent the survey out to over 2,000 data leaders and got We got a ton of great responses back. It's a time of a lot of change, a lot of excitement for data. Everyone knows the world is moving quickly. And it was very interesting hearing what people were doing. I think the most interesting finding to me was 77% of respondents said they were excited or very excited about the impact of AI on data teams, but only 3% said it was a primary focus.
Really?
Right. And so that kind of just highlights this gap of like a lot of people are very excited. Everyone kind of intuitively knows and feels and is getting a lot of marketing certainly that AI is going to change the way data works. But I think very few people have things that are in production that's a mainline focus. And I'll be really interested to see when we do the survey again in a year how that gap closes, that sort of promise-to-reality gap. There's a lot of other interesting findings, but I think that was the one that, that's got the most to us.
Thank you for those key takeaways, Barry. And bringing it back here to Snowflake Summit, you recently announced your integration with Snowflake Semantic Views. Can you unpack this and what's the overall significance they will have on the business as a whole?
So one thing that's really important to anyone working with data is they're working with the right data and they know how to use it.
Right.
And we've been partnering with the Snowflake team as they've been developing semantic views because if customers choose to add semantic information to their data in Snowflake, we want to make sure that's accessible in Hex. And so we built a great integration. If customers go in and build those models, that'll show up right up in Hex automatically and we'll make it just more usable and more accurate in terms of the work people are doing, whether they're using UI or code or AI. So we're really excited about that.
Great to hear. It's an exciting next chapter for Hex. And Barry, taking a step back for a moment, as AI tools become more integrated into everyday workflows, how do you see the roles of data scientists, analysts, and business users evolving? And how is Hex preparing to support this future of collaborative AI-augmented work?
Well, I think at a macro level, there's just going to be a lot more data usage and a lot more data consumption, right? Like being able to start from natural language and get an answer, whether it's something simple like I just want to see a quick chart, whether it's something really complex, like I want to see a deep dive analysis, whether I'm building an app, it's just going to lower that friction enormously. So no matter what persona you are, you're just going to be consuming a lot more data. There's like some questions people get hung up on of like, well, the LLMs will write all the code, so do we need data scientists? I look at it a little bit more like just having been a practitioner my whole career, what makes a great data analyst, what makes a great data scientist was never just I know Python or I know all the SQL syntax.
Right.
It was a lot of other things, problem solving, thinking rigorously, Understanding the data, setting up experiments, that's all stuff humans are still really great at. So I tend to think the shape of the roles will be pretty consistent over the next couple years. I think exactly what it looks like in the moment may change, but that's okay. That's really cool. And I think it's a fun opportunity for people to just do more of the things they love, be more, even more impactful, and ultimately get a lot more value from our data.
It's great to hear, Barry. And I have to say the buzz and excitement is all around us here at Snowflake Summit. And we're quite literally on the show floor here at the Hex booth. I want to bring it back to Snowflake. How does the AI Data Cloud's ease-of-use platform power your data foundation?
You know, when we started the company, one of the founding assumptions around Hex was cloud data warehouses exist and Snowflake was the leader there and that the data cloud exists. It's going to be really easy for customers to bring their data in. It's going to be really easy for them to be able to transform it and prepare it. And the next question is going to be, how do you actually make that useful? And so, you know, the revolution Snowflake has powered over the last, let's call it, 10 years, it's gone from that that process of integration and refinement being weeks, months, years-long projects to being something people can do very, very easily between the platform and the whole ecosystem around it. So in many ways, Hex wouldn't be possible without the foundational assumptions of the Data Cloud. And we're really excited to keep partnering with you guys and keep plugging into more of the great stuff we're both doing. So it's going to be really fun.
Well, Barry, it's always a pleasure. It's been a busy couple of weeks for you here at Hex.
Yeah, it's been really fun. Yeah.
But as you look at the back half of the year, what's top of mind and why?
In some ways, it's a lot of the stuff we've been thinking about for a long time. It's like, how do you help more people get more from their data? We have a bunch of amazing features coming with a lot of Agentic AI stuff, a lot of amazing things with whether it's making it easier to visualize your data, discover things, more better semantic integrations. But our customers all want the same thing. They want their data teams to be more impactful, moving faster, delivering value for the people they're trying to support. And we have a roadmap full of big ideas and little details hills to get us there. And so we're just very, very focused on executing on that and seeing where the world takes us.
I love to hear it. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.
Yeah, me too.
Always a pleasure.
Good to see you, man.
And for the audience watching, I'm Ryan Green with Data Cloud Now. We'll see you next time.
