As the head of ThoughtSpot’s international business, based in London, I have the privilege of working with some of the most forward-thinking digital leaders across EMEA. But every now and then, a customer journey comes along that perfectly encapsulates why we do what we do.
At our recent Agentic Analytics Playbook EMEA event in London, I had the pleasure of welcoming Craig Haughan, VP of Data Engineering—who led the data and analytics charge for CWT—on stage alongside Jimmy Hall, who leads Snowflake here in the UK and Ireland.
For those who don’t know CWT, they are an absolute powerhouse in corporate travel. If you’ve booked business flights, hotels, or itineraries, chances are CWT’s engines are running in the background.
That means managing millions upon millions of complex, fast-moving data points.
Historically, legacy BI kept this data locked away in rigid, pre-defined PDFs. Today, CWT puts live, conversational insights directly into the hands of over 100,000 users.
In fact, their analytics setup is so advanced that when they were acquired, the parent company explicitly called out CWT’s analytics capabilities as a primary driver of the acquisition.
Here is how Craig and his team leveraged ThoughtSpot and Snowflake to turn raw data into a premier business asset.
How Did CWT Go From Static PDFs Into Sub-Second Self-Service?
Before partnering with us, CWT’s data landscape was traditional, centralized, and slow. Business users relied on batch processing, legacy tools like Cognos, and static PDFs.
Craig walked our London audience through CWT’s analytics evolution, and it’s a masterclass in modernizing a data stack:
| The Legacy Era before ThoughtSpot | The Modern Era with ThoughtSpot |
|---|---|
| Static & Rigid: Hard-coded reports and flat PDFs. | Interactive & Live: Instant search across billions of live rows. |
| Heavy Engineering: Constantly building and maintaining BI cubes. | No Cubes Required: Querying live data directly at the source. |
| Gatekept Data: IT teams acting as bottlenecks for basic questions. | True Self-Service: Employees and customers ask their own questions. |
| Slow Infrastructure: Batch processing on on-prem databases. | Sub-Second Speed: 80% of live queries resolve in under one second. |
Why ThoughtSpot? The Power of Natural Language
CWT first crossed paths with ThoughtSpot nearly a decade ago, and over the years, our partnership has scaled into a deep integration of AI-driven conversational analytics.
From my conversations with Craig, the key differentiator has always been our relentless pace of innovation:
"You always worry about whether someone is going to come along with a better, more innovative product. But ThoughtSpot has always managed to stay a few years ahead of competitors. Where others focused on basic visualizations, ThoughtSpot focused on AI, search, and making self-service a reality." - Craig Haughan, VP of Data Engineering, CWT
The "Strawberries and Cream" Synergy: ThoughtSpot + Snowflake
After CWT implemented ThoughtSpot, it was quickly clear that there was a critical scalability issue as a result of their outdated data warehouse platform.
Since we were in London during the height of the Wimbledon season, I couldn't help but use a very British analogy on stage: ThoughtSpot and Snowflake are the "strawberries and cream" of the modern data stack. You simply can't have world-class analytics without a world-class data platform.
By connecting ThoughtSpot’s intuitive semantic search layer to Snowflake’s highly scalable cloud data platform, CWT immediately put any scalability concerns in the past and achieved high-concurrency, real-time analytics.
Horizontal Scaling: CWT serves over 100,000 regular users, including corporate travel clients and call center agents. Snowflake dynamically spins warehouses up and down to handle this massive concurrency without a single performance hiccup.
Direct Live Query: Instead of extracting massive datasets into slow BI cubes, ThoughtSpot queries Snowflake directly.
Unstructured Data Integration: CWT can pull together structured travel data with unstructured policy information (like complex corporate travel rules), allowing agents to easily verify travel compliance on the fly.
How Did CWT's Analytics Platform Influence Its Acquisition?
When CWT was acquired, Craig’s team faced the ultimate test. They spent three months showcasing their ThoughtSpot-powered self-service platform to their new parent company.
The verdict? CWT’s self-service capabilities were recognized as a generation ahead of what was currently in the market. Instead of replacing CWT’s stack, their platform with ThoughtSpot and Snowflake was chosen to roll out to their entire combined customer base.
As a sales leader, this is the ultimate validation of ROI: building an analytics system so robust that it actively increases the valuation of your entire enterprise.
Craig’s Playbook for Analytics Success
Craig shared two core pieces of advice that I think every data leader needs to hear:
1. The "Give a Sh*t" (GAS) Adoption Model
To get value out of data, you have to find the people who actually care about the outcome.
"There is no point in sending someone a PDF they aren't going to open. You have to find the people in your organization who really care and want to be successful with data. They will be infectious to everyone else. If your team doesn't understand why they should care about the data, you won't get adoption." - Craig Haughan, VP of Data Engineering, CWT
2. Be Brave
Entering the world of AI and modern BI can feel daunting, but inaction is the biggest risk.
"Be brave. When you're jumping into the AI/BI world, it is scary. But you've got to try it. I always tell my team: you're not trying hard enough if you don't break things once in a while (just don't break them in a bad way!). If you don't adopt AI, you're going to get left behind." - Craig Haughan, VP of Data Engineering, CWT
How You Can Experience the Future of Analytics
CWT’s journey proves that when you pair a powerful data cloud with intuitive, search-driven AI analytics, you don't just change how decisions are made—you fundamentally change the value of your business.
If you're based in the UK, Europe, or anywhere across our international markets, my team and I would love to show you how we can replicate this success for your business.
Ready to bring search-driven, agentic AI analytics to your data? Explore ThoughtSpot today.
