Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from SnapLogic

SnapLogic is embracing the power of generative AI to simplify digital integration for businesses. At the heart of the company's latest wave of innovation is its commitment to empowering enterprises to automate their data and applications more efficiently than ever.

Speaking to 10 Minute IT Jams, John Tenner, a machine learning engineer at SnapLogic, explained the company's role in transforming how organisations handle data integration. "SnapLogic is a leader in generative integration," he said. "We have gone from an intelligent integration platform to a generative integration platform. As a pioneer in AI-driven integration, the SnapLogic platform accelerates digital transformation across enterprises."

According to Tenner, the goal is to make it faster and easier for customers to integrate their systems and data. "We empower everyone to integrate their system, application, and data faster and easier. We also have API management solutions, data synchronization tools, and a data science framework," he added. This broad suite, he explained, caters to any needs, "whether you are doing automation, democratizing the data, or delivering digital products and services."

Tenner emphasised that SnapLogic has already helped thousands of enterprises worldwide to "integrate, automate, and orchestrate the flow of data across their businesses." He described the company as a platform that can "simplify your technology stack and take your enterprise further."

Generative AI is at the core of SnapLogic's latest improvements. "Everybody has been excited about generative AI and we launched a suite of features in our product called SnapGPT," Tenner said. "It's pretty much the world's first generative integration assistant. When you are building integrations in our product, it assists you in many ways. This empowers enterprises to go faster and become more efficient."

Reflecting on the company's journey, Tenner explained that SnapLogic began incorporating AI-driven features seven years ago, with the aim of assisting users as they build integrations. "We built a recommendation system that assists the user when building integrations, whether selecting the components they want to use or crafting the expressions to help them transform their data," he said.

Initially, the company used traditional machine learning algorithms like decision trees and random forests, as well as neural networks. The result, according to Tenner, was a "recommendation system that has assisted our users for the last seven years to build integrations faster and easier."

The emergence of generative AI has allowed SnapLogic to offer a more sophisticated assistant, which Tenner likened to an "integration co-pilot." Enterprises can now describe their use cases in simple English sentences and SnapGPT "will be able to generate data and application pipelines automatically for you." The benefits, he said, are significant: "This not only shortens the learning curve for new users, because now you can interact with our interfaces in natural language, but generative AI brings it to another level."

Tenner stated that SnapGPT helps "reduce the time it usually takes to build integrations from hours down to minutes." The company is now expanding support to include "SQL query generation, transformation generation, and also script generation, so you can do a lot more complex integrations."

Asked about product development focus areas, Tenner shared that the team is now deeply engaged with large language models. "Our team is laser-focused on generative AI technologies. We are currently working on fine-tuning large language models," he said. Large language models, as he explained, are advanced neural networks trained to understand and generate natural language for tasks like summarisation and translation. By fine-tuning these models with SnapLogic-specific knowledge, the company aims to further personalise and improve its customer service. "Our long-term goal is to have our own large language model deployed internally for each of our enterprise customers, so that we can have dedicated resources for them, guarantee the service level agreement, and also offer better data security."

Beyond generative AI, SnapLogic is also investing in metadata management, which Tenner described as "very important for large enterprises and large-scale data analytics and cloud data warehousing."

Attention is now turning to the Asia Pacific region, where SnapLogic is expanding its presence to meet rising demand. "We try to keep up with the rising demand from enterprises across the APAC region to basically help them do digital transformation, simplifying their business operation and increasing business efficiency by integrating their internal and external systems," Tenner explained. He noted that significant investment is being made in regional engineering resources: "We work hard to scale our engineering team in Thailand and APAC. We do have a SnapLogic Thailand office registered as of last year, and now we are focusing more on the generative AI and professional services team to serve our customers in this region."

Tenner highlighted the company's strategy of hiring local professionals with deep industry and regional knowledge. "We have experienced professionals with extensive industry knowledge and also regional expertise so that we understand the unique needs of businesses in the APAC region and can provide tailor-made solutions."

When asked how prospective enterprise customers can engage, Tenner outlined the company's flexible onboarding process. He explained that SnapLogic offers free trials with no up-front costs and support for both cloud-based and on-premise integration. "The best way to engage with us is to sign up for a free trial, which allows access to our platform and cloud infrastructure for 30 days," Tenner said. For enterprises with more complex requirements, SnapLogic offers proof-of-concept licences: "You can reach out to me or any of our team members. We'll be able to give you a free licence for proof of concept for maybe two or three months, based on the scope of the project."

Tenner assured potential customers that SnapLogic's team is "ready to support you throughout the concept process and answer any questions that you may have about our intelligent integration platform."

Reflecting on the journey so far, Tenner concluded, "We want to make sure that SnapLogic is the right tool for your enterprise, so we would like you to try it first, get your hands on it, and our team will be ready to support you."