The energy at Snowflake Summit 2025 in San Francisco was undeniable, from packed keynotes to announcements that signal a new era for data, AI, and app development. As the summit wrapped, one thing is clear: Snowflake isn’t just building a data platform, it’s building an AI-native enterprise ecosystem.
I was on the ground floor all week with the team from dentsu and Merkle, meeting industry leaders and tuning into the key product launches, trends, and takeaways. One of the highlights for our team was celebrating Merkle’s own Senior VP of Architecture, John Gajewski, who was named Data Hero of the Year, well-deserved recognition for his leadership and innovation.
The most prominent takeaway was that Snowflake just dropped 11 major innovations, each geared toward helping organizations modernize faster, scale smarter, and activate AI across every touchpoint. Big shout out to Snowflake’s Vino Duraisamy, who posted some awesome visual slides on these announcements. Check out her compilation and slides here.
Let’s dive into the announcements and what they mean:
1. Leading AI and ML Innovation
Snowflake is carving a path on agentic AI. The tools announced this year make it clear they want to bring AI-native ecosystems closer to the hands of analysts, data scientists, and even to less technical users.
- Snowflake Intelligence: A new natural language interface that lets users query both structured and unstructured data in plain English. This is a huge step toward AI accessibility and everyday enterprise use.
- AI-Powered SQL: This feature simplifies writing complex SQL queries by turning natural language into optimized code, helping users build faster, with fewer errors.
- Data Science Agents: Think of these as AI copilots for data scientists, generating code, suggesting pipelines, and accelerating experimentation.
Our takeaway: This is yet another clear sign that the future of enterprise data platforms will be conversational, modular, and deeply integrated into business operations. While many other solutions require data that is already clean, Snowflake is taking a strong stance to help organizations ingest the data as-is and leverage these new product capabilities to quickly maximize the data to be AI-actionable.
2. Data Engineering
Snowflake also introduced tools that give data engineering teams more flexibility, agility, and control when building and deploying data products.
- Openflow: A unified framework that supports batch, streaming, structured, and unstructured data workflows all in one place. This makes it easier to orchestrate complex data pipelines without jumping between tools.
- dbt Projects in Snowflake: dbt is now natively supported in Snowflake, which tightens the feedback loop between data modeling and deployment.
- Workspaces: A new environment that enables teams to co-develop applications and workflows in isolated, purpose-built spaces.
Our takeaway: These enhancements help data teams save time in their day-to-day. We’re excited to see how brands embrace these innovations, and what time savings they see.
3. Analytics
The next evolution of business intelligence is semantic and scalable. There was lots of discussion at the Summit around how Snowflake is laying the groundwork.
- Semantic views: This brings a consistent, reusable layer of business logic across tools and teams, making dashboards easier to build and trust. This view helps define terms within a database more consistently to save time for users.
Our takeaway: This is a massive leap toward consistent enterprise metrics — something we’ve been stressing the importance of for years. If you can’t obtain this level of analytics, it’s a major challenge to achieve the level of CX that customers expect.
4. Expanding Snowflake Marketplace
Snowflake Marketplace, the already expansive ecosystem for tools and apps available to users, is expanding! Here are a few new apps that were announced:
- Agents in the Marketplace: Users can now find, install, and purchase agentic native apps on Snowflake Marketplace that perform specific tasks, making it possible to bring intelligent automation into workflows, fast.
- Cortex Knowledge Extensions: Coming soon, this enriches AI apps to extend the reach of LLMs to tap into private enterprise data safely, offering more targeted, contextual responses from your own content.
Our takeaway: The emergence of agentic apps and LLM-powered knowledge extensions in the Marketplace will help CTOs accelerate build vs. buy decisions. Instead of building every workflow from scratch, Snowflake is giving data teams a starting point.
5. Modernizing Platform and Migrations
Snowflake also introduced updates to help organizations modernize legacy systems and make workloads more efficient. This is a big need that we help our clients tackle every day.
- Adaptive Compute: Scale resourcing intelligently by optimizing performance and cost based on demand. It’s Snowflake’s answer to spiky workloads and budget-conscious teams.
- Snowconvert AI: Migrating from legacy platforms to Snowflake just got a lot easier. This AI-powered tooling helps automate code transformation, reducing manual lift and speeding time-to-value.
Our takeaway: Platform modernization is a top priority for any tech leader trying to increase speed to value. These innovations lower the operational burden of migration and optimization, giving CTOs and CMOs a clearer path to consolidating tech stacks toward growth initiatives like CX transformation.
If there’s one thing I took away from Snowflake Summit, it’s that data platforms are evolving into AI-native ecosystems, designed to power every facet of the enterprise. Snowflake’s latest innovations are setting the stage for a more intelligent, agile, and collaborative future.
Wondering how to apply these innovations to your business, or how to get more from your Snowflake investment? We can help. As a Select Tier Services Partner, we've been at the forefront of integrating Snowflake's capabilities to enhance customer experiences. Learn more about our partnership here.
Also hear how Merkury and Snowflake are better together in this interview live from the Summit floor.
