This year’s Snowflake Summit Dev Day was all about empowering developers to build smarter, faster, and more securely—right inside the Data & AI Cloud. From full-stack notebooks to autonomous agents, the focus was on doing, not just watching.
“Building the Future: AI, Innovation, and Developer Empowerment with Sridhar Ramaswamy & Andrew Ng”
“A candid conversation on how AI is reshaping development, education, and opportunity.”
Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, sat down with none other than Andrew Ng, one of the most respected minds in AI. Their conversation wasn’t just insightful—it was a roadmap for anyone navigating the changing world of data, AI, and development. From new tech to career advice, here’s what stood out.
In their talk, Ramaswamy and Ng tackled the rapid evolution of AI, the rise of developer tooling, and how Snowflake is investing in open innovation. They spoke openly about how AI is not just changing software development but democratizing who gets to build. Ng emphasized the growing importance of staying on top of AI developments—not just for engineers, but for everyone. And Ramaswamy laid out how Snowflake’s platform is enabling this shift, from open-source AI tooling to startup acceleration.
🚀 Top 5 Key Takeaways:
AI is leveling the playing field for developers
Anyone with curiosity and access to tools like Snowflake’s Streamlit and Cortex AI can now build prototypes faster than ever.
Snowflake’s mission is open, accessible innovation
Ramaswamy emphasized Snowflake’s investment in open-source tools and AI research—building blocks like TruLens are freely available.
Developers must stay current to stay competitive
Andrew Ng shared that being “on top of AI” is a greater asset than years of traditional experience. Tools change fast; adaptability wins.
Snowflake is fueling startups and new talent
With programs like the Snowflake Startup Challenge and a $200M fund, Snowflake supports companies building on its platform.
Rapid prototyping is now core to innovation
With tools like Streamlit, it’s possible to build a production-worthy MVP in a weekend. The conversation emphasized speed, iteration, and accessibility.
💡Bonus Insight:
Ng drew a compelling analogy: just as artists need to know the language of art to get the most out of AI image generation, developers (and aspiring ones) need to understand how to communicate clearly with AI to build meaningful applications. The takeaway? Learning the “language” of AI is becoming as important as learning to code.
❄️ Snowflake Openflow Deep-dive
Based on the session with Sam Lachterman and the linked press release, here’s a summary of Snowflake Openflow, its value to data professionals, and the key highlights from the session:
🔍What is Snowflake Openflow?
Snowflake Openflow is a secure, real-time data integration framework designed to ingest, transform, and route data across any part of your data estate. Think of it as a “Swiss Army knife for data movement”—whether it’s structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data, Openflow enables flexible and programmable data pipelines that are natively integrated with Snowflake.
💡 Why it matters for Data Engineers & Professionals
Universal Connectivity
Openflow supports ingestion from databases, cloud apps, file systems, APIs, and streaming sources—with bidirectional data movement. You can bring data into Snowflake or push insights back into operational systems.
Flexible Deployment
Openflow can run:
In Snowflake (as a managed SaaS),
In your cloud account (for proximity to sensitive data),
Or hybrid (depending on governance and performance needs).
Security and Governance First
Strong integration with Snowflake’s security model (IAM, encryption, secret management, and audit logging). Supports private deployments, fine-grained access control, and encryption in transit and at rest.
Programmability and Extensibility
Using visual and code-based flows, engineers can define logic for ETL/ELT, CDC (Change Data Capture), enrichment, and data prep—leveraging open-source connectors and Snowflake-native primitives.
No-Warehouse Ingestion
Streams data into Snowflake without requiring an active warehouse, enabling cost-effective real-time ingestion.
🧠 Key Takeaways
Openflow isn’t just for ingest into Snowflake—it’s also for routing data from Snowflake to downstream systems.
It uses a record-oriented architecture that allows high-performance, schema-aware transformation of arbitrary data types.
Built on top of open-source projects, making it extensible and community-driven.
Provides a catalog of prebuilt connectors, with ongoing releases and community feedback loops.
Enables schema evolution handling, CDC support for Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc., and Slack/LLM notificationsin your pipeline.
Openflow integrates with Git for version control, supports SDLC best practices, and enables safe in-place upgrades of pipelines and connectors.
🧭 Related Resource:
🔗 Snowflake Openflow Press Release
For those who want to build scalable, governed, and AI-ready pipelines without glue code or excessive infrastructure setup, Openflow is a game-changer. It’s especially relevant in hybrid cloud, regulated industries, or when real-time responsiveness matters.
❄️ Snowflake Horizon Catalog
Simplifying discovery, governance, and collaboration in the Data Cloud.
In his Snowflake Summit session, Riccardo Muti tackled a familiar challenge for data professionals: most organizations still struggle to get full value from their data because finding the right data assets is difficult. Inaccessible metadata, scattered silos, and unclear ownership make discovery a real bottleneck. Riccardo introduced Snowflake’s Horizon Catalog as a powerful solution—bringing Universal Search, automated classification, access-aware discovery, and curated marketplaces together to democratize data across teams and simplify responsible data sharing.
🧭 What is Snowflake Horizon Catalog?
Snowflake Horizon is a native metadata catalog built directly into the Snowflake platform. It combines powerful capabilities such as universal search, automated data classification, fine-grained governance, and cross-system metadata integration — all in one seamlessly integrated solution. It enables organizations to unify visibility and governance over their structured and semi-structured data assets across Snowflake and beyond.
🌟 Key Takeaways
Universal Search Reimagined
Horizon’s new semantic search can find relevant datasets even when users don’t know the exact table names — powered by AI, synonyms, metadata, and usage context.
Built-In Governance
Integrated features like access policies, data classification (e.g., detecting PII), and audit capabilities allow teams to enforce data governance at scale.
Cross-System Metadata Federation
You can now index and search metadata from external systems like Postgres, SQL Server, and more — making Horizon a true enterprise-wide catalog.
Visibility & Access Requests
Horizon enables visibility into metadata without granting access to the data itself. Users can request access through integrated workflows (e.g., email or ServiceNow).
Marketplace & Collections
Data teams can curate and publish high-quality datasets or dashboards internally (and externally), helping others discover trustworthy data products.
🚀 Why It Matters for Data Professionals
Whether you’re a data engineer, analyst, or architect, Horizon Catalog empowers you to find and trust the data you need faster. It reduces time-to-insight, promotes responsible data sharing, and helps scale a data-driven culture across your organization — especially in hybrid and multi-cloud data ecosystems.
❄️Building Agentic Applications in Snowflake
In this hands-on session, Dash DesAI and Arun Agarwal walked us through how to build smart, AI-powered agents directly in Snowflake using Cortex. These data agents can handle complex workflows—like pulling together insights from all kinds of structured and unstructured data—just by using natural language prompts. You’ll learn how to securely integrate AI into business workflows, make governance easier, and speed up decision-making with real-time answers.
🧭 Related Resources:
💥 Innovations
At Snowflake Summit Dev Day, it wasn’t just about showing what’s possible—it was about shipping innovation. Snowflake introduced several groundbreaking features earlier in the week designed to give developers more power, more intelligence, and more flexibility. Here are the top highlights:
❄️ Snowflake Openflow: A fully managed, open, extensible, fully managed service for multi-modal data integration. 👉 More info
❄️ Adaptive Compute: Smarter infrastructure decisions that optimize performance and cost automatically. 👉 More info
❄️ Snowflake Intelligence: Go beyond reporting—understand why something happened with built-in AI-powered insights. 👉 More info
❄️ Cortex AISQL: The biggest SQL innovation since GROUP BY ALL—ask questions in plain language, get SQL you can run. 👉 More info
💬 Final Thoughts
Dev Day wasn’t just another conference—it was a glimpse into the future of data-native development. If you’re building with Python, SQL, AI, or apps, Snowflake just made it a whole lot easier—and more exciting.
Snowflake Data Superhero and Chapter Lead for the Dutch Snowflake ❄️ User Group. Consulting Partner at Bravinci. Online also known as; DaAnalytics
