Exploring Snowflake Cortex: A New Era for Business Through AI
Adam Morton
Empowering businesses to harness the full potential of data | Best-Selling Author | Founder of Mastering Snowflake Program
Thank you for reading my latest article Exploring Snowflake Cortex: A New Era for Business Through AI.?
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Introduction
Gen AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are continuously transforming the technology landscape. Individuals and companies alike are always exploring the best ways to leverage these new tools to enhance productivity, drive innovation, create new products and services, and extract more value from their data assets.
The market currently experiences considerable hype in this space, with everyone from technology vendors to consultancies to C-level executives discussing the need to engage with these innovations. However, seasoned data leaders recognize that fully adopting and realizing value from Gen AI and LLMs requires several key components.
A critical piece of this puzzle is having a highly scalable, modern, cloud-based data architecture that provides a solid foundation for ingesting, processing, transforming, cleaning, and governing data at scale. Achieving this is no easy feat. Many companies are still navigating this journey, all at varying levels of maturity.
This situation leads to skepticism within the data community about the actual value of Gen AI and LLMs. Technical demos and talks at major technology conferences often highlight these cutting-edge developments. Yet, a minority of attendees are in a position to truly capitalize on these features based on my experience.
Even with a strong, resilient data platform, a persistent challenge, which is neither new nor specific to these tools, is embedding analytical processes into operational, productized workflows.
Technology vendors are addressing this 'path to production' challenge by developing services that integrate seamlessly with existing production data. If your core data foundations are already in place, bringing Gen AI and LLMs to your data—and crucially, making them easy to use—should facilitate easier adoption.
Snowflake now offers Snowflake Cortex, a suite of services designed to provide businesses with easy access to advanced large language models (LLMs). The Cortex service enables companies to integrate cutting-edge AI technologies with their existing data systems securely and efficiently.
The Relevance of Snowflake Cortex to Your Business
For businesses aiming to improve their operations through AI, Snowflake Cortex provides a significant benefit. By integrating AI directly with governed data, companies can achieve secure, efficient, and effective utilization of generative AI. This integration is essential for preserving data privacy and security while maximizing the advantages of AI.
Understanding Snowflake Cortex
Snowflake Cortex is a managed service that enables businesses to easily deploy large language models. These models, which are the driving force behind generative AI applications, can be accessed directly within the Snowflake environment. The service streamlines the integration of AI capabilities by managing complex tasks such as model optimization and GPU infrastructure management. This allows businesses to focus on leveraging AI effectively, rather than on its maintenance.
As illustrated in the diagram below, Snowflake Cortex essentially serves as a collection of AI and LLM functions that can be invoked within the Snowflake environment. Importantly, these functions operate on top of your clean, secure, and governed data that already resides in Snowflake.
Snowflake has developed a suite of services built on top of Snowflake Cortex to enhance data interaction and analysis:
Challenges of Traditional AI Implementation Processes
Before the advent of integrated platforms like Snowflake Cortex, businesses faced numerous hurdles when implementing analytical models. Traditionally, leveraging machine learning (ML) involved data scientists extracting large amounts of data from a central data warehouse and moving it to external systems, such as SAS, for processing.
This method presented several challenges:
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How Snowflake Cortex Addresses These Challenges
Snowflake Cortex addresses these challenges by keeping all operations within Snowflake's secure and managed environment. This integrated approach eliminates the need to export data to external systems, thereby reducing latency and data redundancy. It also allows data teams to maintain better visibility and control over their data, ensuring consistent adherence to security and governance standards.
By simplifying the technical landscape, Snowflake Cortex reduces operational complexity and the need for specialized knowledge across multiple systems. The platform's compatibility with various large language models and its built-in GPU infrastructure further streamline the process, enabling companies to focus more on strategic AI initiatives rather than on technical maintenance.
What Can Snowflake Cortex Do for You?
With Snowflake Cortex, businesses can engage in a variety of AI-driven activities without requiring extensive technical knowledge:
Why It Matters
The seamless integration of powerful tools like Snowflake Cortex into business operations democratizes access to AI, enabling more companies to leverage this technology to drive innovation and efficiency.
Snowflake ensures a high level of data privacy and security with its operations:
Conclusion
Snowflake Cortex represents a significant advancement for businesses aiming to implement AI. With its robust support for various models and seamless integration within the secure environment of Snowflake, Cortex is poised to be a key player in transforming business through AI. Ignore it at your peril!
To stay up to date with the latest business and tech trends in data and analytics, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter, follow me on LinkedIn, and YouTube, and, if you’re interested in taking a deeper dive into Snowflake check out my books ‘Mastering Snowflake Solutions’ and ‘SnowPro Core Certification Study Guide’.
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About Adam Morton
Adam Morton is an experienced data leader and author in the field of data and analytics with a passion for delivering tangible business value. Over the past two decades Adam has accumulated a wealth of valuable, real-world experiences designing and implementing enterprise-wide data strategies, advanced data and analytics solutions as well as building high-performing data teams across the UK, Europe, and Australia.?
Adam’s continued commitment to the data and analytics community has seen him formally recognised as an international leader in his field when he was awarded a Global Talent Visa by the Australian Government in 2019.
Today, Adam is dedicated to helping his clients to overcome challenges with data while extracting the most value from their data and analytics implementations. You can find out more information by visiting his website here.
He has also developed a signature training program that includes an intensive online curriculum, weekly live consulting Q&A calls with Adam, and an exclusive mastermind of supportive data and analytics professionals helping you to become an expert in Snowflake. If you’re interested in finding out more, check out the latest Mastering Snowflake details.