Latest news with #ThomasBodenski
Techday NZ
6 days ago
- Business
- Techday NZ
Snowflake unveils AI tools for data analytics, migration
Snowflake has revealed new artificial intelligence (AI) products aimed at simplifying data analytics and accelerating migration from legacy systems for organisations across Canada and globally. The company announced its expansion of enterprise-grade AI with the introduction of Cortex AISQL and SnowConvert AI, designed to enable customers to extract insights from diverse data types while reducing operational costs and complexity. Cortex AISQL incorporates generative AI directly into database queries, allowing teams to analyse and act on multiple kinds of data—ranging from structured numbers to text, images and audio—while using the SQL syntax familiar to data professionals. The solution is intended to bring what Snowflake describes as "industry-leading performance and up to 60% cost savings when filtering or joining data." Organisations such as Hex, Sigma, and TS Imagine are among those already leveraging the capabilities of Cortex AISQL. SnowConvert AI addresses a common challenge faced by enterprises: moving data from existing warehouse and analytics platforms to modern systems. The tool uses AI automation to ease migrations from providers such as Oracle, Teradata, and Google BigQuery, reducing the need for manual re-coding and lowering the risks typically associated with large-scale data projects. "Every organization recognizes the potential of AI. But too often, harnessing AI means overcoming complex infrastructure, performance limitations, high costs, and a reliance on engineers to build custom pipelines. We're removing those barriers, whether it's enabling anyone to analyze and act on all their data with Cortex AISQL or accelerating migrations off legacy systems through SnowConvert AI. By empowering teams to move faster, work smarter, and turn data into real impact, we're reimagining analytics for the AI era," Carl Perry, Head of Analytics at Snowflake, commented on the new developments. "In capital markets, speed and precision are everything. For years, SQL has been the gold standard for transforming data — and now, with Cortex AISQL, we're extending that power to unstructured text. With AISQL, our teams can analyze documents, extract insights, and build intelligence directly in the language they already know — all without complex engineering workflows. It's a game-changer for how fast we can respond to markets and deliver value to clients, while leveraging the Snowflake architecture for high performing SQL processing," Thomas Bodenski, Chief Operating Officer of TS Imagine, said, sharing his perspective as a customer. Snowflake's Cortex AISQL harnesses generative AI—powered by models from providers such as Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI—to introduce advanced query functions into standard SQL. The result is that data analysts can use AI-powered functionalities within the security perimeter of the existing data cloud, without requiring specialist coding or external tools. According to Snowflake, ongoing performance optimisations have demonstrated between 30% and 70% improvements depending on the dataset, and up to 60% cost savings for certain operations. The integration enables organisations to break down traditional data silos. For example, analysts can merge structured customer data with unstructured data like chat transcripts, images, or social media content, and perform tasks including image classification, call transcript analysis and anomaly detection entirely through SQL queries. SnowConvert AI, meanwhile, is designed to make IT infrastructure upgrades more efficient, automating code conversion, report migration and data validation to streamline the transition to new platforms. By accelerating the code conversion and testing phases by two to three times, the tool is aimed at reducing the overall timeline and resource demands associated with digital transformation. Alongside these tools, Snowflake also announced updates to its platform to further support analytics on open source data formats such as Apache Iceberg tables, and launched Standard Warehouse - Generation 2, which introduces hardware and software improvements to boost analytics performance by 2.1 times over previous editions. With the introduction of these AI-powered features, Snowflake is positioning its data cloud as a central platform for enterprises seeking to modernise analytics and data handling capabilities, and to extract actionable business insights from both structured and unstructured sources.
Business Wire
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Snowflake Introduces Cortex AISQL and SnowConvert AI: Analytics Rebuilt for the AI Era
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company, today announced at its annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, major innovations that expand on Snowflake Cortex AI, Snowflake's suite of enterprise-grade AI capabilities, empowering global organizations to modernize their data analytics for today's AI landscape. Snowflake is unveiling SnowConvert AI, an agentic automation solution that accelerates migrations from legacy platforms to Snowflake. With SnowConvert AI, data professionals can modernize their data infrastructure faster, more cost-effectively, and with less manual effort. Once data lands in Snowflake, Cortex AISQL (now in public preview) then brings generative AI directly into customers' queries, enabling teams to extract insights across multi-modal data and build flexible pipelines using SQL and AI — all while providing best‑in‑class performance and cost efficiency. "Every organization recognizes the potential of AI. But too often, harnessing AI means overcoming complex infrastructure, performance limitations, high costs, and a reliance on engineers to build custom pipelines,' said Carl Perry, Head of Analytics, Snowflake. "We're removing those barriers, whether it's enabling anyone to analyze and act on all their data with Cortex AISQL or accelerating migrations off legacy systems through SnowConvert AI. By empowering teams to move faster, work smarter, and turn data into real impact, we're reimagining analytics for the AI era." 'In capital markets, speed and precision are everything. For years, SQL has been the gold standard for transforming data — and now, with Cortex AISQL, we're extending that power to unstructured text,' said Thomas Bodenski, Chief Operating Officer, TS Imagine. 'With AISQL, our teams can analyze documents, extract insights, and build intelligence directly in the language they already know — all without complex engineering workflows. It's a game-changer for how fast we can respond to markets and deliver value to clients, while leveraging the Snowflake architecture for high performing SQL processing." Snowflake Provides Generative AI-Powered SQL Functions to Help Analysts Do More, Faster Snowflake helps customers leverage generative AI through familiar SQL queries, redefining how organizations analyze data. Snowflake Cortex AI has already enabled customers to build and deploy advanced AI models, apps, and agents within the security perimeter of the AI Data Cloud. Now, Cortex AISQL marks the next leap forward by leveraging generative AI to create powerful new query capabilities, effectively turning every data analyst into an AI engineer. Cortex AISQL is powered by leading models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, OpenAI, and others, coupled with core functionality and performance optimizations already built directly into Snowflake's SQL engine. With Cortex AISQL performance optimizations (now in private preview), enterprises now gain performance improvements ranging from 30-70% depending on datasets, with up to 60% cost savings when filtering or joining data across thousands of records, empowering them to scale their analytics capabilities for strategic decision-making. Traditionally, SQL has been limited to structured and semi-structured data, leaving analysts dependent on developers to access insights from unstructured sources. Cortex AISQL changes this by enabling teams to query all data types — from traditional rows and columns of numbers to text, images, audio, and more — all while using SQL, the universal language they already know and love for managing data. By harnessing SQL with AI-powered functions in Snowflake, analysts can now readily access and analyze multi-modal data at scale, eliminating data silos, consolidating tools, and combining traditional structured data with unstructured sources. This includes enriching customer tables with chat transcripts, correlating sensor readings with inspection photos, and merging sales figures with social media sentiment — enabling analysts to classify images, extract insights from call transcripts, and detect anomalies with ease. The result is a fully integrated SQL experience across all data, unlocking deeper insights, faster decisions, and accelerated innovation without the need for specialized AI skills or external services. Cortex AISQL delivers unified intelligence across the entire organization. Snowflake Accelerates Time to Value with AI-Powered Migrations With SnowConvert AI, Snowflake is making one of the most tedious and time-consuming parts of digital transformation — data warehouse migrations, business intelligence (BI) migrations, and ETL migrations — faster and smarter, without introducing additional risk factors. With data ecosystem migration agents powered by Snowflake Cortex AI, SnowConvert AI enables organizations to quickly and easily move from legacy data warehouses like Oracle, Teradata, Google BigQuery, and other cloud data platforms to Snowflake. By automating the conversion of code, BI reports, ETL tools, and validating the converted code and migrated data efficiently, SnowConvert AI streamlines the migration process for data engineers. SnowConvert AI goes beyond just database migrations, allowing customers to migrate their entire data ecosystem, while staying seamlessly supported and without disrupting critical workflows — ultimately reducing risk, costs, and complexity at every step. SnowConvert AI makes the code conversion and testing phases 2-3 times faster, significantly reducing time-to-delivery and speeding up modernization efforts. By accelerating the path to modernization, Snowflake shortens the time between intention and insight, so organizations can minimize migration timelines and start generating insights that drive results sooner. Global Enterprises Unlock Comprehensive Analytics Across All Data Snowflake's unified approach to analytics represents a fundamental shift in how organizations analyze their data. Snowflake is also unveiling innovations to Snowflake's unified platform that enables enterprises to process all their data, including open formats like Apache Iceberg ™ tables 1, with remarkable efficiency. In addition, Snowflake announced Standard Warehouse - Generation 2 (now generally available) with next-generation hardware and software optimizations to deliver 2.1x 2 faster analytics performance and 1.9x 3 faster analytics performance than Managed Spark. Snowflake customers can now unlock faster AI-powered insights from all their data — wherever it lives. Learn More: Dive deeper into how Snowflake Cortex AISQL is bringing the power of AI directly to data analysts in this blog post. Explore more of the ways Snowflake is expanding its analytics capabilities in this blog post. Check out all the innovations and announcements coming out of Snowflake Summit 2025 on Snowflake's Newsroom. Stay on top of the latest news and announcements from Snowflake on LinkedIn and X, and follow along at #SnowflakeSummit. 1 "Apache Iceberg' is a registered trademark or trademark of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. 2 Snowflake improvements based on performance of core analytics workloads measured as of May 3, 2024 using Standard Warehouse and May 2, 2025 using Gen2. 3 Performance results based on core analytics workloads on 2XL Gen2 warehouse and comparable warehouse on Managed Spark as of May 2, 2025. Forward Looking Statements This press release contains express and implied forward-looking statements, including statements regarding (i) Snowflake's business strategy, (ii) Snowflake's products, services, and technology offerings, including those that are under development or not generally available, (iii) market growth, trends, and competitive considerations, and (iv) the integration, interoperability, and availability of Snowflake's products with and on third-party platforms. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those described under the heading 'Risk Factors' and elsewhere in the Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and the Annual Reports on Form 10-K that Snowflake files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, you should not rely on any forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. © 2025 Snowflake Inc. All rights reserved. Snowflake, the Snowflake logo, and all other Snowflake product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Snowflake Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names or logos mentioned or used herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). Snowflake may not be associated with, or be sponsored or endorsed by, any such holder(s). About Snowflake Snowflake is the platform for the AI era, making it easy for enterprises to innovate faster and get more value from data. More than 11,000 companies around the globe, including hundreds of the world's largest, use Snowflake's AI Data Cloud to build, use, and share data, apps and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI are transformative for everyone. Learn more at (NYSE: SNOW).
