Clekt’s Key Takeaways from Snowflake World Tour 2025
2025 marked Clekt’s 3rd year attending Snowflake World Tour (SWT). It’s fair to say that the size and scale of SWT has consistently increased year on year, but 2025 felt different.
At 10am, we were all sat ready and waiting to see Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswarmy gracing the stage to present the keynote, however a line of attendees queueing around the foyer to get into the venue meant the start times were pushed back. If that level of interest isn’t a sign of data becoming a hot topic around the board table, we don’t know what is.
Despite the number of people yet to arrive, the theatre was full to the brim, and so people were being directed to watch the keynote from screens on the 1st floor. The excitement, enthusiasm and expectation from attendees was palpable. By the end of the day, nearly 5,000 people had come through the doors of the Excel ready to find out exactly how Snowflake can transform their business.
The Keynote in Summary
The keynote consisted of a jam-packed line-up with talks from Snowflake’s UKI Country Manager; James Hall, CEO; Sridhar Ramaswarmy, Co-Founder; Benoit Dageville, VP of Product Management; Christopher Child, Solution Innovation Architect; Becky O’Connor and more. We heard a continuation of theme from 2024, focusing on how Snowflake will enable and simplify the AI journey for customers – reducing the complexity whilst “Allowing your data to do more” and achieve more in the age of AI.
This is what our Head of Solution Consulting, Tom Maud had to say:
“It was refreshing for me that Snowflake recognises that a strong and robust data strategy is essential – before you develop and adopt AI technologies. Trust, security and compliance are key foundations for any projects. The strong partnership demonstrated between Snowflake and Microsoft was fascinating, and it’s fantastic to hear that Snowflake can fully integrate into Azure Fabric lake-house architectures now. Using open standard (Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris) means we can bring the power of Snowflake and embedded AI capability to an existing Fabric deployment – it’s never been easier.”
The Co-pilot to Snowflake integration (through the use of Cortex and Argent MCP Services) means it is even easier to enable business stakeholders to access insights through the use of existing tooling. Achieving data democracy for our clients with support from built in LLMs is something we’re excited by here at Clekt.
Snowflake for Healthcare Organisations
If you’re within the Healthcare space, the opportunities to learn through break out sessions and workshops were endless. As a former NHS Digital employee, our Head of Solution Consulting Tom Maud commented on the sessions:
“I was really interested to understand the work that has been done around Life Sciences and Research with the establishment of these SDE’s (Secure Data Environments for research). It was amazing to hear how NHS hospital trusts are driving innovation and enabling direct care and how Integrated Care Boards (ICB) are transforming care and enabling research and innovation to improve patient outcomes.”
“The power of the Snowflake platform within this context cannot be understated with secure data sharing, compliance and governance at its core. Adopting a modern data platform and having an experienced data service partner has never been more important.”
“The integration of data flows between local, regional and national services to provide a holistic integrated care journey and having access to the latest artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLM) and machine learning (ML) capabilities, gives organisations the ability to augment and accelerate service provision. All within the right clinical, ethical and compliancy frameworks.”
Snowflake for Financial Organisations
In addition to the healthcare related sessions, our teams came away with several core lessons for financial institutions looking to scale their data-driven capabilities. In summary, governance, accuracy and collaboration are key.
Here are the top 5 takeaways from Clekt’s Associate Solution Architect, Elliott Fairhall:
- Governance is non-negotiable
- Autonomy without standards leads to chaos. It’s vital to bake governance into your data strategy from day one—not as an afterthought.
- Accuracy earns trust
- Teams must believe in the data they use. Investment in standards, tagging, lineage, contracts, and audits pays off when results are trusted.
- Collaboration unlocks scale
- A central team that supports and enables, rather than controls every detail, helps domain teams move faster. Shared standards plus local empowerment is the sweet spot.
- Start with areas where insight yields fast wins
- The presenter suggested that general insurance (or comparable business units) are good first domains: you often get to insight faster, which builds momentum and trust for further expansion.
- Keep the human in the loop
- Tools like Copilot or AI assistants are powerful—but only when supported by strong foundations and human oversight. Implementation must be deliberate, not rushed.
“In the breakout session, we heard a financial institution describe how it uses Snowflake to let domain teams build data products and assets within a federated model. In this setup, each team has autonomy, but within guardrails set by central governance. The advantage: innovation and speed without sacrificing control. Efficiency and automation were emphasised as key enablers. By automating repetitive tasks and supporting engineering efforts, the organisation has been able to break down silos and promote more organic growth across divisions. Robust tagging, use of Iceberg tables, and naming conventions has helped to bring accuracy and trust across the teams and tools.”
Business Use Cases That Show Value
Several use cases illustrated how this model brings real benefit:
- Claims analysis: They accelerated insights into claims, allowing quicker issue detection and trend monitoring.
- Underwriting support: Data products help underwriters make more informed decisions, rather than relying purely on intuition.
- Customer & marketing: A single customer view, integrated across pensions and other lines means that when an agent handles a call, they receive summarised insights from all interactions.
- Call summarisation & Co-Pilot/Cortex: In shorter timeframes, the institution is experimenting with “Co-pilot” and “Cortex” tools (or equivalents) to digest call transcripts and surface next-best actions. Still, the human remains in the loop—these tools support decision-making rather than replace it.
So there it is, our write-up of Snowflake World Tour 2025! It’s evident that we are on the brink of a paradigm shift—from tools designed to support data engineering and technical teams to solutions that empower business users to directly access and utilise data through AI-driven capabilities.
The potential to enhance and accelerate service delivery is unprecedented. If you’d like to find out more, or how Snowflake could work for your business get in touch with Clekt today.
About Clekt
At Clekt, we design data solutions with your team in mind so your organisation can deliver more, grow more, and just be more. Be more effective, more decisive, more strategic, and more capable of turning data into outcomes that matter.
We’re an official Snowflake service delivery partner, working with clients to create solutions that connect their teams and enhance their access to insights.
That means making data work for the teams that use it; turning complexity into clarity, and clarity into commercial value. We’re pragmatic in how we solve problems, curious in how we keep innovating, and collaborative in how we shape what your teams actually need. The result is more adoption, more momentum, and more value for your organisation.
Because when data and AI work with your teams, they don’t just help you do more, they help you be more.
