Snowflake Summit 2025: Major Platform Innovations Reshape Enterprise AI and Analytics

Snowflake Summit 2025 unveils central AI and analytics innovations, including Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex AISQL, and Adaptive Compute for enterprises.

Snowflake has unveiled an extensive portfolio of platform innovations at Summit 2025, fundamentally transforming how enterprises approach data analytics and AI deployment. With over 125 product capabilities launched in Q1 alone—double the previous year's pace—the company is positioning itself as the definitive platform for the AI era, serving more than 11,000 global customers with increasingly sophisticated data and AI solutions.

Revolutionary Compute Innovations Drive Performance Gains

At the core of Snowflake's announcements are significant compute enhancements designed to deliver faster analytics performance and improved cost efficiency. Standard Warehouse Generation 2 (Gen2), now generally available, represents a significant leap forward with 2.1x faster analytics performance compared to previous generation warehouses.

"We're reimagining what customers can expect from a modern data platform, delivering faster performance, easier scalability, and greater value for every dollar spent," said Artin Avanes, Head of Core Data Platform at Snowflake.

The Gen2 warehouses combine next-generation hardware with enhanced software optimizations, delivering dramatic improvements across various workloads. Key architectural improvements include enhanced DML processing, which significantly reduces commit overhead; improved filter capabilities that increase concurrent query capacity; and an upgraded query processor that generates more efficient execution plans. The analytics engine now dynamically adjusts resources during query execution, contributing to the overall performance gains. For write-intensive operations like merges and data ingestion, performance improvements can result in 2x to 4x faster execution times.

Perhaps more transformative is the introduction of Snowflake Adaptive Compute, currently in private preview. This managed service represents a fundamental shift from traditional warehouse sizing models, automatically handling resource allocation and optimization without requiring manual configuration of compute cluster sizes. Organizations using Adaptive Warehouses benefit from improved efficiency through automatic resource sharing within accounts, maximizing price-performance while reducing operational overhead.

Snowflake Intelligence: Democratizing Data Access Through AI Agents

The marquee announcement for business intelligence professionals is Snowflake Intelligence, entering public preview soon. This conversational AI platform enables business users to interact with enterprise data through natural language, powered by intelligent data agents that can simultaneously analyze both structured tables and unstructured documents.

During a live demonstration, the platform demonstrated its ability to integrate sales forecasting data with Slack conversations and marketing metrics, providing comprehensive business insights. The system automatically generates verified SQL queries, provides citations for trustworthiness, and can even draft actionable communications based on analytical findings.

"Snowflake Intelligence breaks down barriers by democratizing the ability to extract meaningful intelligence from an organization's entire enterprise data estate," explained Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake. "This isn't just about accessing data—it's about empowering every employee to make faster, smarter decisions with all of their business context at their fingertips."

The platform runs entirely within customers' existing Snowflake environments, automatically inheriting all security controls, data masking, and governance policies. It integrates data from multiple sources, including Box, Google Drive, Workday, and Zendesk, through the new Snowflake Openflow service.

Advanced Analytics Through AI-Enhanced SQL

For data analysts and business intelligence professionals, Cortex AISQL (now in public preview) represents a paradigm shift in how analytics work gets accomplished. This innovation embeds generative AI directly into SQL queries, enabling analysis of multimodal data—including text, images, and audio—using familiar SQL syntax.

The system supports sentiment analysis, image classification, and document processing through simple function calls, eliminating the traditional barriers between structured and unstructured data analysis. Notably, Cortex AISQL represents the first AI Data Cloud enabling native joining of unstructured data with structured data through familiar SQL—a significant advantage over competitors like Databricks, who have announced similar SQL batch inference capabilities but without the native integration.

At the core of AISQL's efficiency is a cost-aware query planner that intelligently assesses computational expenses and determines optimal execution paths. The system applies lower-cost filters first, deferring complex AI operations until necessary, while dynamically routing simpler tasks to smaller models and complex queries to larger models for maximum efficiency. Performance optimizations deliver 30-70% improvements, depending on the dataset, with up to 60% cost savings when filtering or joining data across large record sets.

Thomas Bodenski, Chief Operating Officer at TS Imagine, highlighted the practical impact: "With AISQL, our teams can analyze documents, extract insights, and build intelligence directly in the language they already know—all without complex engineering workflows."

Marketplace Innovations Enable AI-Ready Content

Snowflake is transforming its marketplace into the first AI-ready content ecosystem for enterprise use through Cortex Knowledge Extensions. This innovation enables content publishers, such as The Associated Press, USA TODAY Network, CB Insights, and Stack Overflow, to monetize their content for enterprise AI applications while ensuring proper attribution and compensation.

Content owners can list news articles, textbooks, and research papers on the Snowflake Marketplace, which enterprises can then purchase to enhance the contextualization of their AI-powered applications. The system uses retrieval-augmented generation and Zero-ETL sharing functionality, ensuring content owners maintain control over access and attribution.

Complementing this is the introduction of the sharing of Semantic Models (private preview), which allows organizations to share AI-ready structured data with proper business context. This capability eliminates the time-consuming process of creating semantic models from scratch while ensuring AI systems generate accurate, contextually relevant responses.

Data Engineering Revolution Through Openflow

Snowflake Openflow, powered by Apache NiFi, addresses the critical challenge of data integration in the AI era. This multi-modal data ingestion service provides hundreds of ready-to-use connectors for sources ranging from Box and Google Ads to ServiceNow and Workday, supporting both structured and unstructured data movement.

The service offers deployment flexibility through both bring-your-own-compute models running in customer VPCs and fully managed cloud deployments. With enhanced Snowpipe Streaming capabilities, organizations can achieve throughput up to 10 gigabytes per second with latency as low as 5-10 seconds.

Enterprise AI Adoption Reaches Critical Mass

The scope of AI adoption across Snowflake's customer base tells a compelling story about enterprise readiness. Over 5,200 customers are actively using Snowflake Cortex AI every week, with major organizations like BlackRock, Luminate, and Penske Logistics deploying AI solutions across their businesses.

"At WHOOP, Snowflake Intelligence marks a big step forward in our ability to be a data-first organization, ensuring that all employees can access insights without relying on analytics teams as the intermediary," said Matt Luizzi, Senior Director of Business Analytics at WHOOP.

Strategic Vision for AI-First Analytics

These announcements reflect Snowflake's broader mission evolution: empowering every enterprise to achieve its full potential through data and AI. The company's approach emphasizes three core principles that differentiate its platform in the competitive landscape: simplicity and ease of use, connectivity across data sources and enterprises, and trustworthy AI with proper governance and security.

CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy emphasized the transformative potential: "AI represents a new way of thinking about how different functions within a company operate. It's a little bit of a before-and-after moment, similar to the internet or mobile phones."

As enterprises navigate the complexities of AI adoption, Snowflake's comprehensive platform approach—spanning data engineering, analytics, AI development, and marketplace collaboration—positions the company as a central orchestrator of enterprise AI transformation. The key question for analytics professionals is how quickly organizations can leverage these capabilities to drive meaningful business outcomes while maintaining the security and governance standards that enterprise deployments require.