At Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit 2024, hosted in San Francisco from June 3-6, everyone will be talking about data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).
Industry-leading companies such as CDW, NVIDIA, Microsoft, J.P.Morgan, Meta, ServiceNow, CNN, NBCUniversal and many more will gather to learn about the latest innovations from Snowflake, which close to 10,000 customers use daily to break down silos and develop and distribute modern apps.
This year “promises to be our biggest user conference yet,” says Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. The summit will also introduce the newest generative AI solutions, Apache Iceberg systems and services to improve next-generation cloud computing.
Here’s what you can expect from Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit 2024.
RELATED: How to leverage data analytics in your business.
Making AI Trustworthy and Credible
“We want AI to become easy to use. We want it to become trusted,” says Ramaswamy. Right now, it isn’t.
Wendi O’Neill, senior director of CDW's data and analytics presales team, says it goes beyond matters of ethics and bias; it’s also about the story data tells. “If we're making decisions based on AI, they better be accurate,” O’Neill says.
Ramaswamy will chat with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, about the relationship between data and AI and how IT leaders can turn data into insights to build “data-centric” organizations.
CHECK OUT: CDW and Snowflake’s session at this year’s summit.
Experts will share strategies to reduce errors in AI, from data observability to deploying an AI co-pilot for precise error identification. Speakers including Tom Gray, principal of financial services and data collaboration at Snowflake, Balaram Keshri, vice president of architecture at Fidelity Investments, and Zach Lancaster, data engineer and information designer at WarnerMedia, will also discuss how to build a data pipeline that supports business goals.
Creating a Central Data Hub
Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit 2024 will also focus on modern data ecosystems and why they are a crucial foundation to any successful generative AI deployment.
“Snowflake has excelled at creating an ecosystem with all the different choices and tools that you have,” says Paul Zajdel, vice president and general manager of data and analytics at CDW. “There are a lot of other products that feed Snowflake with information or enrichment, such as AI or machine learning or analytics.”
DIG DEEPER: Accelerate your cloud strategy.
This kind of ecosystem can also “synchronize data across different platforms and departments, so there is more compatibility with legacy systems,” O’Neil says.
It offers “a single source of truth. It’s the hub of data,” Zajdel says. A data ecosystem also fosters collaboration and partnership between companies. “Snowflake lets you stitch together the best tools with the capability you need, and then you can get an integrator like CDW to do the work.”
Reimagining Data Governance for Generative AI
The summit will also cover data governance, privacy and security. Too often, when IT leaders discuss “data governance,” it’s seen as a set of privacy controls. But, O’Neill explains, it actually facilitates rather than hinders generative AI innovation.
CDW Data Quality Lead Ben Castleton and Chief Data Architect Rex Washburn will also give a session on managing data governance with Snowflake Horizon and Snowflake Data Cloud, meeting compliance standards, and leveraging data analytics for strategic decision-making.
“In the era of AI, we should be looking at data governance with a new lens, and that is how to make our data more usable,” O’Neill says. “What can data governance help us do beyond security control? How can it help us actually get usability out of our data in the context of AI? That’s where many data governance programs fall short, because we haven’t made that cultural shift yet.”
That’s the transition IT leaders will be navigating at the summit. Plus, what the future of AI holds.
Keep this page bookmarked for articles and videos from the event, follow us on X (formerly Twitter) @BizTechMagazine and join the event conversation at #DataSummit24.
