Straight from the Multimedia and Digital Business Directory we report on the tech inspired red carpet journey that came alive as Snowflake Tech Stars appeared at BAFTA (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) in London. Enterprise solution avid followers gathered for the “ Data for Breakfast” session on 20th March 2025. The LatestSale.com Founder pays homage to the BAFTA hosts and their immaculate hospitality and celebrates emerging tools that users within the creative sector can take advantage of thanks to Snowflake’s especially adapted solutions that reflect the needs of data powered Marketeers in sectors as varied as Advertising, Media and Entertainment, Hospitality, Travel and beyond.
SNOWFLAKE UNIFIED DATA SOLUTIONS
Snowflake, an American fully managed unified data solution provider with offices worldwide including the UK, helps users to manage their most prized data workloads securely from one seamless, global platform that powers the AI data cloud across numerous cloud service providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Snowflake Director of International Product Marketing Cory Ferreira described the benefits of Athena, the serverless query engine that sits above the S3 data platform build solution, and is intended to store data in the cloud, whilst Glue can be deployed for data integration, cataloguing and governance. Alternatively, Red Shift is used for data warehousing analytics and report generation including populating results on revenue performance. Report building functionality may also be optimized by adopting tools from Snowflake Partner Sigma.
CORTEX AI: “There is no AI strategy without a data strategy”
Ferreira insisted that “There is no AI strategy without a data strategy” and he indicated the dos and don’ts for optimizing and investing in a clear data plan to drive meaningful business transformation. With 80% of the world’s data deemed to be in an unstructured state, AI is expected to be the most effective method to accelerate such analysis with Snowflake tools such as Cortex AI, capable of scanning PDFs and analyzing unstructured data, whilst building generative AI applications using fully managed LLMs such as Microsoft’s OpenAI, as a prime example.
The Microsoft and Snowflake enhanced Partnership has already enabled users to test unstructured data sets for sales, HR, and vendor and supplier data. The Partnership is expected to offer thousands of global enterprises with access to data agents powered by OpenAI’s models inside the Snowflake Cortex AI on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry. Snowflake’s new native integration will facilitate synergy consolidation of Snowflake Cortex Agents alongside their respective Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 apps.
In addition to OpenAI’s models, Snowflake customer options include Anthropic, DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral AI, and more, alongside Snowflake’s Arctic open source language and embedding models.
SNOWFLAKE COST GOVERNANCE
Ferreira highlighted the importance of cost governance, with the sale of compute credits at the heart of Snowflake’s pricing strategy, as is enabling users to access an alert system to monitor costs. The managed service offered by Snowflake simplifies automatic performance improvements, ensuring secure and rapid connection to data warehouses, with instant scalability opportunities maximized.
As a best-in-class data warehouse built for the cloud, the three takeaways highlighted include: ease of use, speed and simplified migration.
SNOWFLAKE CASE STUDY- NISSAN
Case studies bought to the forefront included car manufacturer Nissan whose use of data analytics explored customer sentiment, use of social media parameters that on the whole reduced production timelines by two months.
SNOWFLAKE CASE STUDY- ASTRAZENECA
Dan Parker, Head of R&D, Data, Analytics and AI at bio pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca highlighted the importance of accelerating the delivery of drugs that are more patient focused and explained the concept of the “commercialization of prescriptions.” Parker revealed the bold ambition of the bio pharmaceutical giant to launch 20 new medicines and maintain sustained growth.
Parker insisted that transforming the way we work, innovating and embracing change management by deploying AI and robust data management techniques offered huge potential for the drug discovery process and planned go-to-market timelines.
SNOWFLAKE CASE STUDY- SIGMA PARTNERSHIP
Sigma, the data and analytics Partner of Snowflake emphasized the opportunity offered through data assets, the frontline of all businesses with the propensity to create real world impact. The Sigma analytics stack sits on top of Snowflake’s with a wide set of useful functions such as translating spreadsheet data and language.
SNOWFLAKE CASE STUDY- JEFFERIES
Don Stalter, North American Partner of Global Founders Capital gave the audience insights into the leading full service investment banking and capital market firm Jefferies with HQ in New York, and explained how AI and strategic data strategy implementation assisted the firm with security research. As a contributor to the BOARDROOM INTELLIGENCE Jefferies Insights podcast, Stalter attested to the pain points of most investment firms and how these could be addressed with a forward-thinking data plan. These included streamlining data management that often lacks centralization and often generates data duplication. Other pain points mentioned were overall system complexity issues and thirdly, scalability challenges. Stalter emphasized the importance of the one stop shop for data required for financial services regulatory reporting.
THE END OF DATA SILOS
An eventful, breakfast and brunch session where delegates certainly discovered the “building blocks for an effective data strategy” to unlock AI, ML and apps innovation, accelerating the journey into inspirational product development. Snowflake’s desire to push customers to eliminate data silos, govern access to all data across a company’s ecosystem, and empower all teams has become a reality. The forefront of innovation was accompanied with an inspiring on-stage Snowflake product demo, demonstrating the platform’s flexibility no matter the programming language of choice (Python, SQL, Java, Scala etc).
Image credit: chrisdorney – stock.adobe.com (BAFTA)
Image credit: JHVEPhoto – stock.adobe.com (JEFFERIES)
Image credit: Sergio Delle Vedove – stock.adobe.com (ASTRAZENECA)
Image credit: logoboom – stock.adobe.com (SNOWFLAKE)