Snowflake Summit 2024: Accelerating business value in the AI Data Cloud

Key takeaways from Snowflake’s annual user conference

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, the ability to quickly harness AI’s transformative potential can be the difference between leading the market and lagging behind. At the 2024 Snowflake Data Cloud Summit, what stood out most was Snowflake’s unwavering commitment to accelerating time to value in the era of enterprise AI.

This year’s Summit showcased advancements in three key areas that are set to redefine how organizations leverage data and AI: groundbreaking AI advancements, strategic partnerships that amplify value, and platform innovations that automate and democratize AI and data insights. Read on for Slalom’s insights on how these developments are creating a fast track to AI-driven success.

AI advancements: From experimentation to business impact

Key takeaway: AI’s true value lies in rapid, business-aligned deployment

The buzz around AI is inescapable, but buzz doesn’t pay the bills — business impact does. Slalom is focused on helping customers take a strategic and value-driven approach to AI investments to achieve clear returns on investment (ROI). Snowflake’s announcements this year also signaled a decisive shift from AI experimentation to AI-driven business value.

At the heart of this shift is Snowflake Cortex AI, now supercharged by NVIDIA AI Enterprise software like NVIDIA NeMo microservices for information retrieval. This integration allows organizations to efficiently connect custom AI models to their proprietary data for highly accurate insights and queries. Additionally, Snowflake’s open-source Arctic large language model (LLM) is now optimized with NVIDIA’s TensorRT-LLM for peak performance. With faster model deployment, more efficient inference, and the ability to tailor AI solutions to specific use cases, organizations can get contextualized AI insights into the hands of decision makers at unprecedented speeds. It’s a game changer for enterprises looking to move beyond proof of concepts (POCs) to full-scale customized AI deployments that drive real business impact.

But speed isn’t just about technology; it’s also about who can use that technology. Newly announced features like Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search (now in public and private preview, respectively) empower business users without deep technical expertise to create simple AI applications. This isn’t just a technical win; it’s a business acceleration strategy. By democratizing AI development, Snowflake is empowering companies to tap into the domain knowledge of customer-facing teams, operations experts, and others across the enterprise to rapidly prototype and deploy AI solutions aligned with real-world needs.

This focus on business-aligned AI was echoed in Slalom’s AIOps session, Unlocking AI for Speed and Scale, which laid out practical steps and considerations for getting AI into production. The key message? Model evaluation is important, but aligning AI with business cases is critical. The session’s popularity — with attendees lining up afterward for more insights — underscores a market-wide hunger to move beyond POCs to production-ready AI.

Strategic partnerships: Amplifying value through collaboration

Key takeaway: Partnerships drive speed to value across industries and technologies

In the age of generative AI, the ability to create value from data increasingly relies on harnessing the strengths of multiple technology providers and partners. Snowflake’s strong collaboration with companies like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Slalom provides enterprises with a unified data foundation coupled with the specialized expertise required to rapidly extract value from AI across any sector or use case. From infrastructure and model optimization to custom application development and data unification, these partnerships represent a catalytic force empowering companies to turn AI aspirations into reality.

Day two of the conference featured the announcement of Slalom and Snowflake’s Strategic Collaboration Agreement — an unprecedented investment in joint solution development and go-to-market strategies to deliver tailored data and AI solutions faster than ever before. This deepened collaboration, highlighted by Slalom’s recognition as Snowflake’s 2024 Media & Entertainment Partner of the Year, underscores our ability to drive industry-specific value at velocity. Through this symbiotic partnership, which provides Slalom early access to pioneering Snowflake features like Cortex and the Arctic LLM, Slalom is matching the pace of Snowflake’s innovation through the development of generative AI offerings, industry-specific solutions, and cross-industry accelerators. Uniting Slalom’s proven expertise in operationalizing advanced data platforms into tailored, high-impact use cases with Snowflake’s powerful, ever-evolving technology suite, this strategic collaboration empowers organizations across sectors to maximize returns on their AI and data investments.

On the technology side, expanding on Snowflake’s recent integration with Microsoft Fabric through Apache Iceberg, the introduction of Polaris Catalog is yet another example of how Snowflake is breaking down data silos to fuel AI-powered experiences. This cross-platform interoperability isn’t just a technical feat; it’s a business accelerator. By allowing users to explore and view definitions and features of open-source Iceberg tables across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Confluent, Dremio, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, and even Databricks, Snowflake is enabling faster analytics and reducing the fear of vendor lock-in that often slows digital transformation.

In addition to the powerful technology integrations and joint solutions highlighted, Slalom and other partners are providing valuable expertise to help customers maximize their Snowflake investments. In a joint speaking session with Snowflake partner SqlDBM on day three, we outlined the six key pillars and best practices of data modeling to equip Snowflake customers with the expertise to properly design and build out their cloud data platforms from the ground up or during migration from legacy systems.

These strategic partnerships represent a powerful convergence of Snowflake’s cutting-edge AI Data Cloud with the specialized expertise of partners like Microsoft, NVIDIA, Slalom, and more. The velocity created by these collaborations empowers companies to continually extract maximum value from their data assets, driving accelerated time to value across diverse industries and the full technology stack.

Platform innovations: Automating and democratizing data value

Key takeaway: Snowflake’s innovations turn data into rapid business value

Even the most powerful engine needs a well-designed vehicle to deliver value. Snowflake’s platform innovations are that vehicle, automating processes and democratizing data to turn insights into impact faster.

Take Snowflake Serverless Tasks Flex. By allowing users to set deadlines and automatically scaling compute to meet them, it’s turning the dream of “data on demand” into reality. No more waiting for reports or wasting resources on idle compute. In the business world, where time is quite literally money, this is a profit accelerator.

Another game-changing release is the announcement of Snowflake Internal Marketplaces, which will allow companies to create their own, organization-specific Marketplace accessible only to internal users. By enabling departments like HR, finance, and marketing to share and monetize data within their organizations, Snowflake isn’t just moving data; it’s catalyzing a data-driven culture. When data flows freely, so do ideas and innovations.

For developers, the new Snowflake Trail provides a unified control plane to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize code execution, compute utilization, and data pipelines. The Snowpark pandas API boosts data engineering productivity by providing a seamless bridge between Snowflake’s scalable compute resources and the well-known pandas data manipulation tools. Meanwhile, the Data Classification UI empowers self-service data cataloging by allowing users to define custom semantic categories and metadata tags aligned with their unique domain expertise.

These developer-focused capabilities complement Snowflake’s automation of Serverless Tasks Flex for on-demand data prep and Internal Marketplaces for democratized cross-functional data sharing. Collectively, these innovations bring Snowflake’s evolving vision of the AI Data Cloud to life — providing a comprehensive, streamlined platform to accelerate extracting value from data rapidly and securely across any enterprise use case. With unified governance, security, and access, data doesn’t just sit in Snowflake; it propels businesses forward.

Conclusion: The fast track to AI-driven success

From keynotes to breakout sessions, the 2024 Snowflake Data Cloud Summit made clear that the platform isn’t just enabling AI; it’s becoming the backbone of our clients’ AI strategies. With advancements in AI that prioritize moving from experimentation to impact, partnerships that amplify capabilities, and platform innovations that put data power in the hands of more people, Snowflake is enabling accelerated creation of real-world business value from AI technologies at enterprise scale.

Special thanks to Mark Albers, Joe Berg, and Santhosh Subbarao for their contributions.

Slalom is a next-generation professional services company creating value at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity. Learn how our partnership with Snowflake can help you leverage AI sustainably, maximize returns, and stay competitive in today’s market.