What to expect from Snowflake Summit 2023
Keen to dig below the headlines and find out if the claims are real, the Computer Weekly Developer Network team is off to Snowflake Summit – staged in Las Vegs from June 26-29… and billed as the ‘world’s largest’ data, apps and AI conference.
Well, it is held in the ‘oh my gosh it takes half an hour to get to the entrance from my hotel room’ site that now makes up Ceasar’s Forum in Las Vegas.
Spoiler alert, Ceasar’s Forum is not in Ceasar’s Palace, it’s across the road and nestled in behind Ballys & Harrahs, but that’s another story for another slice of shoe leather.
This is Snowflake’s fifth annual user conference and the company has pledged to use it to explain how enterprises can bring generative AI to their data.
Some 10,000 people attended last year and all bets are on a similar attendance level this year.
Data + gen-AI
The company says that Snowflake Summit 2023 will offer a deeper look at Snowflake’s latest innovations, use cases and thought leadership across four days and will include a fireside chat on generative AI with Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder and CEO. There are more than 400+ sessions, 200+ onsite partners, featured speaker panels and numerous specialised tracks focused on enterprise success in data and generative AI.
“We are in the midst of an AI revolution powered by data that will reshape nearly every aspect of the enterprise,” said Denise Persson, chief marketing officer at Snowflake. “Snowflake Summit is the place for organisations to learn how to access, build and monetise data, tools, models and applications in ways that deliver immediate business impact.”
Keynote presentations include sessions from chairman and CEO of Snowflake Frank Slootman, Snowflake co-founder and president of products Benoit Dageville, Snowflake SVP of product and Christian Kleinerman, all of whom will be unveiling the next wave of Snowflake’s product innovations including bringing 3rd party LLMs to data, delivering 1st party LLMs as services and creating LLM-enhanced product experiences.
Some of the big customers speaking at Summit include, Sony Interactive Entertainment, ComCast, Morgan Stanley, ExxonMobil, JetBlue, Siemens and Thomson Reuters.
Vertical data clouds
Since the last Summit, Snowflake has continued to launch new vertical Data Clouds, to meet the demands and requirements of customers within those specific sectors. This includes Snowflake Telecom Data Cloud and Snowflake Manufacturing Data Cloud.
In terms of recent acquisitions, Snowflake says it continues to expand its workforce and specialisms in AI with the recent acquisition of Neeva to add generative AI search to Snowflake Data Cloud. The company also acquired SnowConvert a Mobilize.Net suite of tools to reduce migration effort and improve the speed of customer data migrations to the Data Cloud.
Snowflake will also be announcing the winners of its Data Drivers Awards at the event.
“Snowflake is quickly putting built-in functionality to distill insights from unstructured data, LLM-powered user experiences and infrastructure for leading LLMs and their front-end apps directly into the hands of customers. Nearly every enterprise is assessing the potential for generative AI to better serve their users and customers,” notes the company, in a press statement.
At Snowflake Summit 2023, attendees can look forward to generative AI and LLM content, including a Thursday keynote panel featuring Andrew Ng, Landing AI founder & CEO; Ali Dalloul, Microsoft VP Azure AI; Jonathan Cohen, Nvidia VP of applied research; and moderated by Snowflake SVP of Product Christian Kleinerman.
Diverse analytic workloads
Snowflake notes that it works to enable businesses to mobilise their data with its Snowflake’s Data Cloud – and says that customers use the Data Cloud to unite siloed data, discover and securely share data and execute ‘diverse analytic workloads’ today across multiple clouds and geographies.
The event hashtag is #SnowflakeSummit
