Welcome to our coverage of Snowflake Summit 2025 in San Francisco.
The event kicked off with a welcome keynote from Sridhar Ramaswamy and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, before we got into the details of Snowflake's latest innovations and saw how customers are using them.
If you missed any of the news or updates, you can read it all below!
It's day one of Snowflake Summit 2025, and our priority is heading over to the registration desks for badge collection. The main event starts tomorrow, but tonight we're being welcomed by Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy who will be joined by OpenAI's Sam Altman.
We’ve just picked up our attendee badge at the Moscone Center ready for this week’s Summit. Today, it’s a chance to have a leisurely look around the venue before we join this evening’s welcome keynote.
After a quick intro from Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy and EVP of Product Christian Kleinerman in the press room, we've now taken our seat for the welcome keynote in the main hall. We're told the big announcements are to come tomorrow.
Joining Ramaswamy on stage and probed about how enterprises can effectively adopt AI, NYSE President Lynn Martin advises businesses to stick to their core principles and the use cases for AI will follow, challenging the opposing view of throwing AI at a wall and seeing what sticks, "like spaghetti."
Well that was a challenge – maybe all 5,000 attendees were connected to the Wi-Fi, because our internet connection suddenly dropped. We've a few more posts to come this evening from the welcome keynote before we sign off for the night...
Joining us on stage for a brief 15 minutes, OpenAI Founder and CEO Sam Altman shared some valuable insights into what comes next.
Altman compared today's AI to a company intern, a junior employee at best. In the future, he envisions AI becoming more akin to an experienced or senior worker, with agents that can discover new knowledge just one or two years away compared with today's agents that are merely capable of handling repetitive cognitive tasks.
Asked to define artificial general intelligence (AGI), the OpenAI leader explained that our expectations adjust continually. Show today's ChatGPT to someone from five years ago, and they might believe we already have AGI. Altman explained that what really matters is the year-over-year rate of progress – he expects the past five years of progress to continue for another five years.
Offering a tiny glimpse of what's to come from OpenAI, Sam Altman said that the emerging behaviors will be "breathtaking." There's a lot more progress to come, he added.
Ending this evening's keynote, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy revealed that the company has become an official partner and sponsor of the LA28 Olympics. Snowflake CMO Denise Persson presented a one-off snowboard to commemorate the announcement as the stage filled with snow.
And that's it for tonight. Remember to come back tomorrow for all the details on what's new. Fingers crossed the Wi-Fi sorts itself out by then...
In just a couple of hours, Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Product, Benoit Dageville, and Snowflake EVP of Product, Christian Kleinerman will take to the stage to announce new products designed for companies of all sizes.
So here we are, it's day two and Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Product, Benoit Dageville has taken to the stage to welcome us.
Similar to Snowflake's goal of making data management simple, Dageville wants to do the same with AI – make it "easy, connected and trusted."
Described as "a new compute service that lowers the burden of resource management by maximizing efficiency through automatic resource sizing and sharing," Snowflake has announced Adaptive Compute to help customers improve economics and realize cost savings.
EVP of Product, Christian Kleinerman, confirmed that Snowflake is deprecating password-only sign-ins. "We will force you to be secure" with passkeys, authentication and dark web monitoring, he added.
Snowflake Marketplace is also gaining Offers, enabling customers to access custom terms and pricing, further driving cost efficiency.
Another big announcement – Generation 2 Warehouses use faster hardware and software optimizations for 2.1x faster analytics performance.
"As data volumes grow and workloads multiply, traditional compute can't keep up – slowing down queries, creating bottlenecks and dragging down productivity," the company said.
Now onto Snowflake Intelligence, which "brings secure AI agents on top of your data, accessible for anyone in your organization."
Data teams can configure and provide access to agents so that the chatbot, which lives at ai.snowflake.com, can share insights into data. Perfect for those Monday morning emails from execs and stakeholders who demand information now. Includes citations for answer verification.
That's a wrap on today's keynote – we're busy pulling together all the information to prepare to chat with some of Snowflake's execs and leaders over the next two days.
This morning, we're hearing from Danica Fine, Senior Manager for OSS Developer Relations, about how customers have been using Snowflake's innovations. We'll be busy jumping between keynotes, breakouts and interviews today, but stay tuned for our roundup of announcements soon.
As the event draws to a close, here are some of the major announcements made at Snowflake Summit 2025:
- Snowflake Intelligence (public preview) – natural language AI assistant for analysts to query structured and unstructured data
- Cortex Agents (public preview) – agentic AI platform for enterprise data
- Cortex Knowledge Extensions (generally available soon) – lets AI apps use licensed content via RAG
- Semantic models (private preview) – structured data models to improve AI interpretability
- Cortex AISQL (public preview) – embeds GenAI into SQL queries for the analysis of multi-modal data
- Standard Warehouse Gen2 (generally available) – next-gen virtual warehouse with 2.1x faster analytics performance
- Snowflake Adaptive Compute (private preview) – auto-scales and auto-manages compute resources
- Copilot for Horizon Catalog (private preview) – AI assistant for governance and security queries
