Data Analytics

What to Expect at Snowflake Summit 2025: “AI Is Only as Powerful as the Data Behind It”

Businesses are at a turning point on their AI journeys, shifting from experimentation to full-scale deployment. GenAI integration, native apps and data governance will make that possible.

Lily Lopate

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Lily is a Senior Editor at BizTech Magazine. She follows tech trends, thought leadership and data analytics.

This year’s Snowflake Summit, live in San Francisco from June 2-5, unites over 20,000 data and AI professionals. The event will feature over 500 sessions, 200 onsite partners and 36 hands-on labs that will cover how generative AI creates tangible business value, plus the latest innovations in data architectures, data governance, machine learning, flexible programmability and more.

Attendees will hear the latest announcements about Snowflake Cortex, Apache Iceberg, Snowpipe Streaming and Dynamic Tables. “Cortex is helping organizations move beyond traditional dashboards into more dynamic, embedded intelligence. Right now, it’s being used to power things like natural language summaries of business metrics within business intelligence tools, real-time document classification, and retrieval-based search across internal knowledge sources — all without needing to move data or build stand-alone applications,” says Christopher Marcolis, head of presales, data at CDW.

Attendees will also learn about the “new era of data gravity” in a fireside chat between Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Data gravity describes how “data acts like a planet, exerting a gravitational pull. As the pool of data grows, so does the strength of its pull,” attracting more applications and services and “influencing how subsequent data will interact,” according to CrowdStrike.

“AI is only as powerful as the data behind it,” says Ramaswamy. “Snowflake Summit 2025 will demonstrate how we are making AI and data come alive with Snowflake’s trusted data platform, serving as the engine helping global enterprises unlock AI’s value.”

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Some Standout Sessions and Tracks

Snowflake Summit 2025 offers a range of tracks for enterprises, small businesses, financial service organizations and more.

AI and Generative AI: Explore the transformative potential of AI in analytics, data management and application development.
Data Engineering and Streaming: Learn about building efficient data pipelines and real-time data processing.
Governance, Security and Privacy: Understand how to balance data access with compliance and implement modern data governance frameworks.
Application Development: Discover how to build, ship and monetize applications directly within Snowflake.
Business Intelligence and Analytics: Follow the latest trends in BI and data visualization.

The Role of Data Governance in AI Initiatives

AI tools are only as good as the quality of the data they learn from. In a CDW session on “Minimum Viable Data Governance (MVDG),” with Marcolis and Ben Castleton, principal consultant on data quality at CDW, IT leaders will learn how to determine whether data is ready for a large language model.

“We help organizations assess where their data governance, security and AI maturity stand, then build practical roadmaps tailored to their platforms and goals. What sets us apart is that we don’t approach governance as a bolt-on or compliance exercise — we integrate it directly into data engineering workflows, platform configurations and even AI model design,” says Marcolis.

Integrating GenAI Into Existing Data Stacks

Experts at Snowflake Summit will discuss integrating generative AI into existing data stacks. This is the only way that teams can break down data silos and ensure that different departments have real-time access to insights.

This is a critical stage, but it’s not without its hurdles. “IT leaders often face three big challenges: fragmented data, unclear governance models for AI and a lack of resources to operationalize use cases,” says Marcolis. “The most successful teams are tackling this by consolidating their data estate, putting policies and controls in place early, and leveraging tools that lower the barrier to experimenting with GenAI, without creating technical debt. Snowflake’s architecture, especially with Cortex and Native Apps, is trying to address these issues head-on.”

Co-Development Opportunities With Native Apps

Attendees will also learn how the Snowflake Native Apps Framework allows teams to build and share apps using the same secure data platform. This means more co-development, bringing new AI-powered tools to market more quickly.

“We’re starting to see meaningful co-development happening across three types of organizations,” says Marcolis.

First, “software providers are embedding specialized analytics apps that run entirely within the customer’s Snowflake environment,” he says.

Second, Snowflake partners have started “building reusable accelerators for domains such as finance or compliance,” he says. This has streamlined operations and customer experiences, and eased the regulatory burden on financial teams. (Sessions with the New York Stock Exchange will cover this trend of why banks have emerged as an “enthusiastic and early adopter of generative AI.”)

And third, enterprises are “developing internal apps for functions like forecasting or spend optimization, without having to deploy stand-alone infrastructure,” Marcolis says. “This keeps the data and logic close together and simplifies everything from billing to compliance.”

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