Everything You Need to Know from the Snowflake World Tour 2025

Snowflake World Tour is a global series made up of 23 events across 3 key regions. These city-based events highlight the latest from Snowflake, product announcements, and networking opportunities. Members of the Keyrus NORAM Snowflake team attended the Toronto Snowflake World Tour to give you all the information you'll miss.

Snowflake World Tour 2025 Core Themes

At Snowflake World Tour, there have been 4 core themes: AI Data Cloud, AI + Data Together, Enterprise Governance and Trust, and Customer Impact.

• AI Data Cloud Front and Center: Snowflake emphasized its role as an enterprise-grade AI platform, with 50%+ of accounts already using AI capabilities.

• AI + Data Together: The focus is less on data availability and more on semantics, context, and quality as the key drivers of business value.

• Enterprise Governance & Trust: There is a large focus on guardrails, explainability, and a new Data Trust Symbol to ensure governance and security remain core while adopting AI.

• Customer Impact: A key example was Siemens’ deployment of Cortex Agents, achieving 55% faster problem-solving and 50% downtime reduction for factory technicians.

Product Announcements

During the product announcement portion of Snowflake World Tour, there was an emphasis placed on the Snowflake Intelligence suite, further cementing their transformed positioning as an AI-focused platform.

• Cortex AISQL → Natural language to SQL with governance.

• Cortex Agents → Short- and long-term memory, coordination across multiple AI tasks.

• Cortex Search → “RAG in a box” for retrieval-augmented generation.

• Cortex Analyst & Document AI → Extract, embed, parse structured/unstructured data.

Breakout Session Highlights

Our team attended various breakout sessions. Here are the key takeaways from 5 different sessions:

1. Transforming Documents, Images & Audio

   1. Ready-to-deploy multi-modal functions for unstructured data.

   2. Built-in validation frameworks to reduce hallucinations.

2. Building Cortex Agents (Best Practices)

   1. Componentized approach (Cost | Access | Quality).

   2. Guardrails and visibility as first-class citizens.

   3. Example: using Cortex to automate insights and generate an agent-summarized email.

3. Advanced Analytics (AISQL & Semantic Views)

   1. Native semantic views allow faster scaling of governed BI.

   2. Data quality and interoperability as the backbone for reliable AI outputs.

4. Managing Costs & Optimizing Performance

   1. Stronger org-level visibility into query spend and performance.

   2. Budgets by tag to enforce cost accountability.

   3. Pruning history and optimization data for fine-grained performance tuning.

5. Business Value Measurement

   1. New frameworks for tracking ROI of Snowflake adoption.

   2. Focus on business outcomes (uptime, productivity, adoption metrics) vs. just cost savings.

Conclusion & Final Notes

Overall, the Snowflake World Tour has shown that Snowflake is positioning itself as an AI-native enterprise platform, not just a data cloud. There is a noticeable shift towards:

• AI as a first-class workload alongside SQL.

• Governance + semantics as the true differentiators for enterprise adoption.

• Operational efficiency through adaptive performance, cost visibility, and dynamic data processing.