The Analytics Engineering Podcast Inside Snowflake's AI roadmap (w/ Chris Child)
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Dec 14, 2025 Chris Child, VP of Product Management at Snowflake, dives into the future of data engineering and AI. He highlights the evolution from Snowpark to Cortex and the importance of row-column governance for AI agents. Chris discusses Snowflake's commitment to Apache Iceberg for better interoperability and how artificial intelligence is reshaping data access and processing. He predicts a shift towards standardized data products and emphasizes embedding semantic context in data workflows for more intelligent decision-making.
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APIs That Abstract LLM Complexity
- Cortex exposes higher‑level APIs (including AI SQL) that abstract model and prompt management for RAG and unstructured tasks.
- AI where/joins are useful for exploration but remain non‑deterministic for production pipelines today.
Keep Model Execution Inside Your Perimeter
- Use Cortex within Snowflake to keep model execution inside your security perimeter so data never leaves your account boundary.
- This approach avoids sending queries or documents back to external model providers by default.
Internal GTM Assistant Uses Company Data
- Snowflake uses Snowflake Intelligence internally as a GTM assistant that combines structured usage, CRM, and meeting notes for sales briefs.
- The assistant enforces role-level security so reps only see accounts they are entitled to.