Snowflake Summit 2024: Changes & Trends in the Data Cloud Community

The past twelve months have been transformative for the Snowflake community. At least, that’s our chief takeaway from Snowflake Summit 2024.

Like previous years, we were overwhelmed by the exciting presentations, innovations, and conversations. Plus, it was a real treat to see Keebo customers face-to-face! 

Over the past few weeks, our team has been debriefing and processing our experiences at the Summit. If we wrote all our positive takeaways and stories in this blog post, you’d be stuck with a 10,000+ word article (which no one wants to read). 

Instead, let’s focus on the most encouraging and noteworthy changes we noticed from last years’ Summit and what they spell for the future of the Snowflake community and broader data cloud ecosystem. 

1. Snowflake customers have become more technical

Last year (and, really, for several years prior), a typical conversation with a Snowflake customer would go something like this: exchange pleasantries, spend some time talking about high level benefits and business use cases, and maybe, eventually, get into technical detail. 

Not this year. In fact, the opposite was true: nearly every conversation immediately went technical. This was true across the board, with decision makers, salespeople, engineers, analysts, CFOs—virtually everyone wanted to get into the weeds as quickly as possible. 

This should come as no surprise to those familiar with Snowflake. In fact, it’s the logical outcome of Snowflake’s mission: lower the barrier of entry to the data cloud, encourage adoption even among non-technical users, and build a more diverse and broader user base.

As this data democratization continues and access to these tools continues expanding, buyers are encouraged to get more technical so they can learn how to leverage cloud data warehouses like Snowflake more effectively. What’s more, the challenges and priorities facing businesses (see #3 below) incentivize more intimate knowledge of these platforms and capabilities. 

Overall, this is a net benefit for the data cloud ecosystem. The more aware Snowflake users are of its nuanced technical capabilities, the better positioned they’ll be to optimize costs and maximize its value—which only helps everyone involved. 

2. There’s AI, and there’s AI

If you spent more than five minutes in the exhibit hall this year, you’d have noticed AI here, AI there, and AI everywhere! (Unless, of course, you walked around with your eyes closed—in which case you certainly would’ve been run over, given how busy the floor was.)

It felt like everyone had “AI” somewhere in their messaging, whether we’re talking developers, security and compliance firms, or even consultants. It’s a sign of the times—everyone has to talk about AI to be relevant. 

On the one hand, this is encouraging, as it shows a broad recognition of AI’s true potential and value. It feels like we’re moving past the days, even a year ago, where companies and decision makers were afraid of leveraging AI—the whole “AI’s coming for your job” of it all. 

Now, data teams are quickly realizing that AI actually automates tasks that humans aren’t able to do. Just to use an example from Keebo: no one’s waking up at 3am to change their warehouse settings for five minutes, then going back to sleep. But that’s exactly what AI is doing. 

Data teams are realizing it doesn’t threaten their jobs. Rather, it augments & compliments their own manual efforts. As a result, people are more open to AI and its capabilities.

On the other hand, there’s a negative aspect to all this. Since AI has become a bit of a buzzword, there’s a lot of noise out there. It’s harder to tell which companies and solutions (like Keebo) are leveraging AI in solutions that deliver tangible business results, and which ones are just trying to get more eyeballs. 

The good news: as Snowflake customers become more technical (see #1 above), this problem will soon sort itself out. 

3. Cost & security are top of mind

Without a doubt, the top priorities among almost every Snowflake customer we talked to—decision makers, engineers, data scientists, analysts, etc.—were cost and security. 

Given the state of the economy overall, this shouldn’t be surprising. We’ve all seen the damage to public reputation that security breaches can cause—not to mention an average $4.45 million cost per breach. 

And as markets tighten, companies have to adapt and do more with less, cost efficiency and a sharper look at ROI become top priorities. Snowflake users, in particular, can often fall prey to ballooning cloud costs and over-provisioning, prompting questions into whether they’re leveraging those compute resources as optimally and wisely as possible. 

The focus on cost optimization may be the biggest change from last year’s Summit, where many attendees were hesitant to adopt automated cost optimization measures. Instead, they wanted to rely on insights and advice, and make the actual adjustments to Snowflake manually. What’s more, there was a stronger tendency to want to build optimization solutions internally rather than adopt a third-party solution.

Now, these same Snowflake users are quickly realizing that there are better places to deploy engineering resources than rote optimizations, and a greater interest in automated, AI-powered solutions. Just as anecdotal evidence, there were several sessions on Snowflake cost reduction, and all of them were packed with standing room only. 

Final thoughts on Snowflake Summit 2024

Of course, there are plenty more takeaways from Snowflake Summit 2024, but these are the biggest contrasts from last year’s event. Taken together, they signal a huge turning point in the broader Snowflake community—now that most enterprises are in the cloud, the next question is how to leverage it most efficiently. 

That’s where Keebo can help. Our real-time, AI-powered optimizations have drastically reduced our customers’ Snowflake costs—saving many customers 25% and more. To see how this works in practice, set up a Keebo demo today.