Capital One Offers Cost and Security Management for Data and AI

Widespread adoption of cloud-based data platform services provided many enterprises with flexibility and agility as well as lowered costs through the avoidance of overspending on infrastructure. Many early adopters also found that delivering sustainable cost and flexibility benefits from cloud-based data platforms was dependent upon dedicated investment of time and resources in cost and performance management, as well as data security and data governance. Capital One Financial Corporation’s experience with cloud data platforms led to the creation of a dedicated software practice, Capital One Software, for managing, optimizing and securing cloud-based data platforms that serve the needs not only of the financial services provider but also of other enterprises.

Capital One Software was launched in 2022 to build a business around Capital One Slingshot. Slingshot is a data management software product initially developed by Capital One to accelerate and manage its internal adoption of Snowflake’s cloud-based analytic data platform. The journey to the launch of Capital One Software can be traced back to 2013 and the adoption by Capital One’s internal IT team of a new agile development approach that embraced RESTful APIs, decentralized and collaborative development and cloud computing. Capital One began its transition to a cloud-first company in 2016 and completed its migration away from on-premises data centers to the cloud in 2020. Along the way, it adopted Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud and became an investor in the company in 2017.

The origins of Capital One’s Slingshot software began with the need to develop internal tooling to ensure that the company realized potential business value improvements by managing costs and automating governance processes related to Snowflake. Key goals included reducing the amount of time and resources spent on managing Snowflake warehouses and ensuring that Capital One’s central IT teams did not become a bottleneck that limited the adoption of Snowflake across the company. With the launch of Capital One Slingshot in 2022, the internal development work was made available to other enterprises.

Slingshot provides data operations (DataOps) and financial governance capabilities, including monitoring Snowflake costs, performance and usage, with granular reporting based on business domain, project or individual user, and alerts that notify database administrators about usage or cost anomalies. Capital One Slingshot also provides data warehouse sizing recommendations to meet cost and performance requirements, identifies inefficient queries and suggests remediation, and sets schedules for automatic provisioning of warehouses.

The product also provides capabilities for monitoring spending on Snowflake AI tokens and, as such, addresses many of the key cost management challenges cited by participants in ISG’s AI Value study, including model token usage as well as costs related to data preparation and management and cloud infrastructure. Slingshot has also been enhanced with the addition of contextual AI capabilities, including query optimization, table optimization and the detection of duplicate pipelines, as well as configuration change impact analysis, query performance analytics and interactive cost analysis. Capital One has also recently added metadata-driven AI cost observability with its Agent Observe feature, which is designed to detect AI agents and services registered to a customer’s Snowflake account and to provide users with information about usage and cost over time. Agent Observe also provides users with a graphical lineage view of triggers for each agent as well as the data tables it interacts with.

In addition to expanding the functionality available with Slingshot, Capital One Software also expanded its focus to data security in 2025 with the launch of its Capital One Databolt product. Databolt is a tokenization offering designed to enable enterprises to protect sensitive data at scale. Databolt can be used to replace sensitive data with secure tokens that preserve the underlying data format for referential integrity and continued operation with analytic models and applications, while protecting against risk exposures in the event of a data breach. Databolt also expanded Capital One Software’s purview beyond Snowflake by providing integration with multiple AWS data platforms, including Amazon Redshift, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Athena and Amazon RDS PostgreSQL, as well as Databricks.

Cloud data platform services remove the requirement for upfront hardware and software licensing costs and, in theory, make it far simpler for enterprises to scale data resources up and down to maximize the efficient use of resources in response to usage requirements. Efficient use of cloud services is easier said than done, however, and failure to do so can result in unexpected costs. Similarly, while AI services have the potential to drive efficiency gains, many enterprises have struggled to monitor and manage AI costs. As my colleague David Menninger asserts, through 2028, one-third of enterprises will face limitations on generative AI (GenAI) deployments and ROI due to a lack of the tooling and governance necessary for cost-effective implementations. Capital One Software is well-placed to take advantage of the focus on AI costs, as well as the wider challenges posed by data and AI governance and security. While the company is most relevant for existing or potential users of Snowflake, the launch of Databolt indicates that its ambitions extend beyond cost and resource management for Snowflake environments. I recommend that enterprises evaluating products and providers for cloud data management and security include the company in their evaluations.

Regards,

Matt Aslett