Snowflake: ‘Complexity creates risk, costs and friction, while simplicity drives results.’
Snowflake kicks off its 2025 Summit, where it has demonstrated its commitment to AI and data, highlighting real-world use cases, new partnerships and its vision for the future.
Snowflake is holding its Summit 2025 in San Francisco (USA), an event that has brought together attendees from all over the world and from every industry imaginable, with the aim of doing more with their data. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy opened the event by highlighting the company’s unwavering focus on its customers and its commitment to innovation in the field of data and artificial intelligence (AI).
‘The energy here is electric. And I have to start by simply saying thank you,’ said Ramaswamy, emphasising that “doing more with data is not just about technology; it’s about learning, inspiring, empowering each other and working together to build a culture around data and AI within your organisations.”
Snowflake Summit 2025
Ramaswamy, who has been CEO for 15 months, highlighted Snowflake’s obsession with the customer and its focus on innovation, especially in bringing AI ‘to life.’ Snowflake’s mission is to ‘empower every business to reach its potential with data and AI.’ AI is ‘fundamentally changing the way we work and operate in our daily lives,’ bringing to life ideas that once seemed like science fiction, such as personalised medicine or virtual shopping experiences, all through the power of data and AI.
Snowflake is dedicated to reducing friction, breaking down silos and making the complex seem simple, making it easier to extract value from data. Simplicity is a fundamental principle in the design of Snowflake’s products, as ‘complexity creates risk, cost and friction, while simplicity drives results’. This is a philosophy that they claim to apply to Snowflake’s AI data cloud.
Customers driving transformation with Snowflake
The keynote featured numerous examples of how companies are leveraging Snowflake’s AI data cloud to achieve results:
For example, Caterpillar uses Snowflake AI Data Cloud to create a unified view of customers and operations, turning siloed data into real-time information to monitor and manage equipment availability and utilisation.
In its case, AstraZeneca has implemented 118 data products that have freed up thousands of hours of productivity and more than £10 million in savings. The company has improved lung disease survival rates by 90% thanks to data-driven early detection.
The opening keynote also featured NYSE Group President Lynn Martin, who shared how the stock exchange manages staggering volumes of data, processing a record 1.2 trillion incoming order messages per day in April 2024, compared to 350 billion in 2022. The NYSE uses Snowflake to ensure market integrity and efficient risk management, and leverages AI tools such as Cortex to analyse vast data sets and navigate complex regulations, which have increased by 40% over the last decade. Martin emphasised that ‘you can’t do that without incredible technology’ and that ‘AI is an ally’ in regulatory navigation.
Other examples focused on companies such as BlackRock, Tripod Viper, Thompson Reuters, and Penske, which are using Snowflake AI to improve customer engagement, filter spam, gain real-time insights, and optimise supply chain and asset security.
On the other hand, industry leaders such as Stripe, Rocket and State Street securely share data with their partner and customer ecosystems through the Snowflake Marketplace, which has more than 3,000 listings and 750 partners.
In terms of verticals, the City of San Francisco and New York City Health and Hospitals use Snowflake to gain a unified view of their data and improve public services and patient care, respectively, emphasising the security and governance of sensitive data.
UPX Energy, Workday, Securonics, Booking.com, Illuminado Health, Google, Chicago Trading Company, BMW Group, and Ericsson were also cited for their use of Snowflake to unify data, transform real-time events, leverage open table formats, optimise workloads, and power autonomous networks with AI.
Strategic acquisition of Crunchy Data
On the first morning of Snowflake’s Summit 2025, in a key move for the developer ecosystem, the company announced the acquisition of Crunchy Data, a leading provider of open source PostgreSQL technology, during its annual Snowflake Summit 2025 conference. This strategic move will enable the addition of a new offering called Snowflake Postgres, an enterprise-ready, AI-ready solution based on PostgreSQL, which will provide developers with a robust, secure database that is compatible with the most demanding operational standards. The goal is to facilitate the development of critical AI applications and agents directly in Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud.
PostgreSQL, used by nearly half of developers worldwide, is key to modern operational applications. Snowflake Postgres will leverage Crunchy Data’s technology, recognised for its readiness for regulated environments such as FedRAMP, to enable complete lifecycle management of enterprise applications. Early beneficiaries include Blue Yonder and LandingAI, who will see accelerated delivery of operational solutions and improved performance in their AI applications.
In addition to integrating Crunchy Data’s capabilities into its platform, Snowflake will support existing Crunchy customers, expanding its reach into highly regulated industries such as finance, government, and enterprise SaaS. The new solution will be available soon in private preview.
Los Angeles 2028: Partnership with global sport
In addition, Snowflake has also announced a strategic partnership with the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and LA28, becoming the official partner of the AI Data Foundation for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.
This collaboration seeks to provide a seamless data and collaboration experience for one of the world’s most iconic events, helping to manage the immense complexity, including the sale of 12 million tickets over a 17-day period.
Sam Altman’s perspective on the future of AI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Ramaswamy to offer insight into the AI landscape. Altman has advised business leaders to ‘just do it’ and ‘experiment,’ as ‘models are changing very quickly’ and companies with the fastest iteration speed will win. He has even gone so far as to point out that the technology is now ‘really ready for widespread use’ in businesses, unlike a year ago.
Altman also discussed the concept of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), suggesting that the ‘rate of progress’ seen over the past five years is more important than a static definition of AGI, and that this rate of progress is likely to continue. In conclusion, Sam Altman also expressed enthusiasm for the ability of future models to solve ‘enormously important’ business problems and ‘discover new science’ autonomously, acting as ‘experienced software engineers’ or even ‘AI scientists.’
The future is driven by data and AI
Ramaswamy concluded the keynote by emphasising that Snowflake is the destination where ‘data does more’ for companies’ end-to-end data and AI journey. The company helps power critical operations, simplify complex processes to accelerate innovation, and partner to drive AI transformation, helping organisations reach their full potential.
The summit promises a week full of major product announcements, deep dive sessions, customer stories, and partner exhibitions, building a united community in creating the future.
