Clektive Thinking – Top Snowflake Releases from 2025

Snowflake are soon entering their new financial year, which means we can expect to hear about their plans for 2026 and beyond. However, in 2025 they released a staggering 42 updates and as a result it can be quite easy to miss the benefits that a new product or a new release can bring to a business – to your business.

In this episode of Clektive Thinking, our colleagues Chris Harling and Elliott Fairhall have taken a look at Clekt’s top three Snowflake’s top releases of 2025. Why? Well, for starters we’re all bombarded with tech news every day meaning it can be easy to miss a new feature and secondly as a Snowflake specialist, our team wanted to highlight the features available to you today and strip away the jargon surrounding them.

Video Summary

1. Snowflake Horizon Catalogue

In short, Snowflake Horizon catalogue is a data catalogue produced and provided by Snowflake.

This helps to support data governance within organisations and to find their data in different places – and not just data that is native to Snowflake but across platforms and clouds, for example Azure, Google and AWS. You can take the information, discover it, manage it, and govern it for the entire data estate. This is fantastic for organisations working with sensitive data as it means you’re able to protect structured and unstructured sensitive data. You can auto-classify, you can tag and can protect, ensuring team are properly managing compliance risks. And to reiterate, that might be data that doesn’t necessarily live within your Snowflake platform. This provides assurance because it’s part of what you call a ‘lake house’ architecture and this idea of using open standard interoperable formats. Having this open standard means that you’re not locked into the Snowflake platform entirely. For example, it can be managed under the banner of Snowflake but there’s also an open-source version as well, which is called Apache Polaris, supported by Snowflake.

Ultimately, data can be accessible by multiple teams, different platforms, and helps a business to understand where the organisation’s data, assets, where it lives via a single pane of glass.

• Snowflake Cortex AI SQL

Snowflake Cortex AI SQL is a collection of different AI powered SQL functions. What does this mean? In short, they can use large language models (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) to analyse structured or unstructured data within your organisation. In the past 12-months, we’ve seen a flurry of new abilities being released, but to bring them to life for our readers, here are a handful of examples and the benefits they could offer to an organisation. For context, when we refer to unstructured data, it’s things like text, images, audio, documents and PDFs.

AI Transcribe: This is a demonstration of a release that has gone under the radar. You can load files (e.g. audio and video files) into your Snowflake instance and AI Transcribe can then take that information and then identify the speakers, how long a duration of a meeting lasts or a different, an element of a conversation lasts and generate the content based off the audio or video file and store it.

AI Extract: This tool can extract structured information from texts or images or documents. For example, if you have paperwork or PDFs lying around that have contain important information you can run AI Extract on that and get the insights from them with minimal effort

AI Sentiment: AI sentiment enables you to use subjective information that’s stored within Snowflake, identify the sort of the specific granular emotions, and develop a score. For example, if we were running a call centre, we could be bringing call logs into the platform and analyse customer sentiment within Snowflake meaning our teams don’t need to pay monthly for another off-the-shelf SaaS product and we can access a broader range of data – including structured and unstructured.

• Snowflake Intelligence

Snowflake Intelligence provides you the ability to ask questions of your data using natural language and that is what makes this a game changer.

Putting ourselves in the shoes of a CEO or Marketing Director, we can instantly understand which products were sold in the last six months. We can identify which products have seen a decline in sales in the last quarter without needing to tap into our analyst function. You don’t need to submit a ticket to understand or access your data – which can create bottlenecks in particular for ad hoc but urgent queries. This platform utilises natural language querying meaning you don’t need to be an expert in using SQL or code. However, what you do need is organised and clearly defined data with clear and concise definitions.

In short, this feature provides CEOs and leaders/managers to make data-driven decision-making in a much faster way.

Summary

It’s been incredibly difficult to pinpoint just three areas that excite us here at Clekt. We have honourable mentions for Workspaces for developers (to be able to collaborate), DBT functionality (making it easier to develop models within Snowflake) which we’re finding are game changers from a developer standpoint.

But the common theme amongst all these releases is that we’re seeing a need for technical teams and business teams to start working together a lot more collaboratively to enable data driven decision making. By choosing Snowflake, you’re reducing barriers to reach that nirvana and you’re getting the latest innovation.

In short collaboration is a theme, so too is innovation, we can clearly see AI powered functionality is a theme. But, there’s also interoperability where the Snowflake Horizon catalogue comes into play.

We want to be able to govern our data – we want to be able to put the right access and control in place. We want to make sure that we have the right information at the right time with the right access. This means we can make the right decisions – and ultimately, put data at the fingertips of people who may not have been able to access it in such a way before.