insight
Snowflake World Tour landed in London this month to tell a powerful story - one where AI is no longer the ‘art of the possible’ but ready for the here and now.
Snowflake specialist Arran Bayliss-Chalmers covers the groundbreaking announcements from Snowflake World Tour London - and what they mean for practitioners, strategists, and leaders.
This year’s Snowflake World Tour showed a clear shift for Snowflake; to take on the AI race, they must move from data platform to intelligent platform.
This direction was underpinned by a strong, consistent message that resounded across speaker talks and panels: the future of AI isn’t just about automation, it’s about autonomy. For Snowflake, this means becoming the purveyors of systems that can act, reason, and adapt responsibly.
The message was grounded in three areas of notable development for Snowflake:
1) Strategy: a defined Agentic direction
2) Technology: improved unification with dbt integration
3) Thought leadership: a firm point of view on practical AI implementation
Strategy: Snowflake’s new AI and Agentic direction
Snowflake is expanding from a data platform into an intelligence layer through Cortex, bringing models, reasoning, and “agentic” behaviour directly into the data plane.
Key highlights:
- Cortex Agents enable autonomous, context-aware workflows that can reason over data and take action within governance boundaries.
- Cortex AISQL lets you call LLM reasoning directly within SQL — blending structured logic and natural language seamlessly
- Snowflake Intelligence (with OpenFlow and multi-LLM access) is building the foundation for orchestrating data-driven AI agents across different workloads.
What that means for us
Snowflake is moving AI closer to the data, reducing friction between insight and action.
For enterprise teams, this means less “prompt engineering” and more trusted, governed AI systems that can operate on your existing data foundation.
Technology: dbt Integration for greater unification
This might have been the most quietly powerful announcement.
Snowflake now supports dbt Projects natively, meaning you can build, run, and version dbt Core models inside Snowflake without relying on external infrastructure.
Key points:
- Full dbt project lifecycle management in Snowflake (via Snowsight + Git)
- Integrates with Snowflake Tasks for orchestration
- Simplifies observability, governance, and CI/CD
- Bridges the gap between dbt Core (open source) and dbt Cloud (managed SaaS)
- Positioned to leverage dbt Fusion, the new high-performance compiler for next-gen analytics
What this means for us
This reduces stack complexity, keeps transformations where the data lives, and strengthens the governed data foundation required for AI and agentic workflows.
For many teams, it’s the most practical step yet toward truly unified data and transformation architecture.
Thought leadership: Pragmatism over hype in FS
The Financial Services industry dominates Snowflake's customer base and is often a focal point of these events. However, as a sector which continuously pushes the boundaries of data and AI, it provides useful thought leadership that can be used to reflect upon and challenge ways of working in any industry.
The FS narrative was refreshingly grounded. Gone is the “art of the possible”; now, we’re talking about ROI, responsible AI, and long-term value.
Key takeaways:
- Augmentation > Automation: AI should enhance, not replace, decision-making.
- Unified governance and enterprise data strategy are essential for compliance and scalability.
- Responsible AI and explainability are no longer optional — they’re table stakes.
- Balance quick wins and long-term delivery: success comes from pairing experimentation with durable architecture.
What this means for us
Snowflake’s AI vision resonates most where trust, traceability, and control are paramount — and Financial Services is the proving ground for that philosophy.
What’s next: here and now
On stage at World Tour, Snowflake showed how they are pushing their capabilities to enable real-world AI use cases. Behind the scenes, they are collaborating with partners like Kubrick to help put them into action.
We were proud to receive Snowflake’s Innovation Excellence Services Partner Award the night before World Tour kicked off. This was a reflection of the work we’re doing to build scalable, secure data and AI solutions that directly tackle some of the biggest challenges across industry, like Anomaly Detection in supply chains (watch our demo here).
But the award is also a reflection of our shared point of view and mission. At Kubrick, we see Snowflake as more than a data platform – it is a powerful engine for intelligence. By sharing Snowflake’s perspective on strategy, technology, and thought leadership, we can help make our mutual customers make the shift, too.
Get in touch to learn more about Kubrick’s partnership with Snowflake:
