Snowflake Summit 2025: What’s real, what’s hype, and what to watch

Snowflake Summit is back and thousands of people are descending upon San Francisco to attend a conference full of hype, superlatives, and brand activations. This year’s theme, “Build the Future of AI and Apps” is the perfect kind of jargon to get a CIO who’s under pressure from his leadership to shell out a few grand for a ticket just to show he’s doing something.

With tens of thousands of people in attendance, some are honestly here to learn, some have real thoughts on how to lead in the AI-powered future, and some are just here for parties and free drinks. For the genuinely curious, here’s our guide for separating the signal from the noise.

What’s real: new approaches to classic challenges

Love it or hate it, existential threat or not, AI is here and it’s forcing organizations to rethink problems they thought they had solved 20 years ago.

Agentic AI & autonomous workflows

AI can analyze, build, and iterate with minimal hand-holding. It’s ok to be skeptical but if you aren’t at least trying take advantage of these capabilities you are in for a rude awakening as your competitors move faster, operate leaner, and automate things that used to take them days. At Hex, we’re investing heavily here: our AI-powered Workspace is already helping teams accelerate analysis, build apps faster, and generate forward-looking insights with less friction.

(Stop by Club Hex to see how we’re operationalizing agentic analytics right now.)

Open data architectures (Hi, Iceberg 👋)

Apache Iceberg and open formats are getting their spotlight — and for good reason. They're enabling modern teams to do more with less lock-in. Shameless plug, Hex plays nicely here: we’re architected to meet your stack where it is, not force it into a box and we feel strongly that this is in the best interest of you, the customer.

Modern governance and scale

Compliance is no longer a back-office concern. As AI becomes more embedded in workflows, ensuring proper access controls, auditability, and responsible usage is critical. Big tech vendors are gobbling up data management vendors left and right. Expect this year’s Summit to highlight advancements in real-time consent management, fine-grained permissions, and scalable governance models that don’t slow teams down. The trick for customers will be doing so in a way that doesn’t track them in the same old expensive, overweight tech stack.

We believe AI and security don’t have to be at odds. Smart governance enables both and we’ve proven this ourselves at Hex.

What to be wary of: the hype index

Tech vendors hurling jargon and slapping their name on the latest trend is a classic technique and this year is no exception. Be wary of sales pitches that try to distract you with a hypey story, but seem a little light on calories

Old enterprise tech with new AI candy coating!

Let’s be honest: there’s a lot of AI theater on stage this year. We love AI — and are deeply invested in building AI-native workflows — but we’ve also learned that real value comes from integrating AI into end-to-end workflows, not just plopping a chatbot on top of your warehouse.

Platform Lock-In

Snowflake’s ecosystem is growing fast. That’s exciting — but also a little… sticky. This is why we’re building with openness in mind: integrating natively with Snowflake, but giving you the flexibility to scale your data ops how you want, not how someone else mandates. This will be critical in order to build data stacks that stand the test of the rapidly changing AI era.

And if you could use more clarity on Snowflake’s LLM’s offerings, download our guide.

What we’re watching

Keynote: Altman & Ramaswamy

Big names, big ideas. This fireside will be worth watching for where OpenAI and Snowflake think things are headed — and how they envision the next wave of analytics products.

Cost, ROI & efficiency stories

The NBA will join us in a killer session on how they think about Snowflake cost and analytics ROI. Music to our ears — and directly in line with how teams can get more value, faster, from the stack they already have.

Builder tracks & AI tooling

We’re tuning in hard to sessions on developer workflows, semantic layers, and open AI integration — all things we’re pushing forward inside Hex. If you’re building internal tools or platforms, these sessions will be fire.

Where Hex comes in

We’re not just watching the future — we’re building it.

Hex is the platform for agentic analytics: AI-native, collaborative, and built to empower data teams to go from question to action faster than ever. Whether you're doing deep-dive analysis, building reusable data apps, or enabling true self-serve for business users, we’ve got your back.

Come join us at Club Hex this week to see the future in action- and have a nice bevy too.