Snowflake Expedition 2026
Global virtual event, Americas schedule, 3–5 November 2026
Table of Contents
Event
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Event | Snowflake Expedition |
| Host | Snowflake |
| Dates | , 13:00–18:30 EST daily |
| Format | Virtual, free; keynotes, "State of" sessions, build sessions, hands-on labs |
| Agenda | snowflake.com/en/expedition/ams/agenda |
| Registration | snowflake.com/en/expedition/ams |
Each day has a theme. Tuesday is the platform: governance, semantic views, Iceberg, compute, apps and observability. Wednesday is marketing and sales, and Thursday is finance. The platform day is the one for this site.
Worth attending
- State of Observability: Telemetry as a Data Asset (Tue 17:30 EST, Jacob Leverich). The pitch is to move telemetry out of special-purpose stores and into the general data estate. That makes telemetry one more table that is late by however long ingest takes. Ask what age the investigation UI shows next to each value. Every View Is Late makes that the first of five rules for any live view. See ObservabilityCON 2026 for Grafana's approach, where Adaptive Telemetry cuts cost by controlling what gets ingested, and Agent Telemetry Systems.
- Secure and Govern Data & Agents Across Every Surface (Tue 14:00 EST, broadcast). Covers agent identity, access control, behavior auditing and cost. Read it against A Practical Layout for Agent Identities and the gateway version of the same question in the Postman agent gateway webinar. Bot and Agent Trust Management covers the four agent registries shipped in 2026, none of which interoperate, and Agent Permission Guardrails separates session-wide grants from per-operation checks.
- Build One Business Context for Every Agent, App, and Person (Tue 14:30 EST). Cortex Sense, Semantic Views and a "business ontology" that declares which metric definition is official. Compare it with the semantic-layer and ontology arguments at Semantic Layer Summit 2026, where Snowflake's Josh Klahr sat on the open-semantics panel, and Microsoft's version of the same move, Fabric IQ binding an ontology to warehouse tables, in Frontier Transformation Week.
- Building the Sovereign AI Stack (Tue 15:30 EST, Satya Nadella and Sridhar Ramaswamy). A fireside chat on what an enterprise must own when it uses frontier models. Watch for whether "own" means weights, traces or evaluation data.
- How to Manage Costs with Tokenomics and FinOps (Thu 15:00 EST) and Attribute and Optimize AI & Cloud Costs in Snowflake (Thu 17:00 EST). The second describes Snowflake's own attribution pipeline: ingest from each provider, a dbt attribution model and anomaly detection before close. Compare with LLM Cost Monitoring.
Alignment with this site
Each row pairs a session with a note on this site that covers the same problem. A session can appear more than once. Sessions with no match are left out.
| Session (day, EST) | Our note | Strength | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Secure and Govern Data & Agents (Tue 14:00) | Bot and Agent Trust Management | strong | Four platforms shipped agent registries with the same catalog, approval and audit shape, and none interoperate. |
| Secure and Govern Data & Agents (Tue 14:00) | Agent Permission Guardrails | strong | It separates session-wide grants from per-operation checks, which is the question of when an agent's grant is evaluated. |
| Secure and Govern Data & Agents (Tue 14:00) | A Practical Layout for Agent Identities | partial | Role-scoped credentials per agent, at the scale of one person rather than one platform. |
| Build One Business Context (Tue 14:30) | Semantic Layer Summit 2026 | strong | Same argument from AtScale, with Snowflake's Josh Klahr on the open-semantics panel. |
| Build One Business Context (Tue 14:30) | Microsoft Frontier Transformation Week | partial | Fabric IQ binds an ontology to warehouse tables for agents, which is Microsoft's version of the same product. |
| Build One Business Context (Tue 14:30) | Semantic Divides | tangential | Four teams each define "Product" differently; the note poses the alignment question but does not answer it. |
| Build One Business Context (Tue 14:30) | Identity Store Enterprise Ontology | tangential | It validates a declared model with SHACL, but the model is identities and credentials, not metrics. |
| State of Databases (Tue 14:30) | Agent Permission Guardrails | tangential | Its database-proxy section finds no open tool that blocks destructive SQL from an agent at the Postgres wire. |
| Building the Sovereign AI Stack (Tue 15:30) | LLM Cost Monitoring | partial | The API-versus-local breakeven is the ownership question at one-operator scale. |
| Building the Sovereign AI Stack (Tue 15:30) | Building a Clojure Agent Environment | tangential | Its open-weights section shows that a recommended model needs 148 GiB resident, so owning weights means owning hardware. |
| State of Analytics: Agentic Analytics (Tue 16:00) | Neo4j and Google AI Workshop | partial | A generated query and a template query produced equally tidy answers, and only the template one was right. |
| State of Observability (Tue 17:30) | Every View Is Late | strong | It proposes that every live view show the age of its data, which is what telemetry in a warehouse has to answer. |
| State of Observability (Tue 17:30) | ObservabilityCON 2026 | partial | Grafana cuts telemetry cost at ingest, the opposite move to keeping all of it as warehouse data. |
| State of Observability (Tue 17:30) | Agent Telemetry Systems | partial | It argues for one queryable metrics file over a collector at small scale; the note is a placeholder. |
| Brand Visibility in AI Search (Wed 14:30) | Bot Operator Contract Surface | partial | It classifies the AI-search crawlers seen in this site's logs, which is the access side of being visible in AI search. |
| Brand Visibility in AI Search (Wed 14:30) | UNBOUND 2026 | tangential | It lists HubSpot's answer-engine sessions but records no findings from them. |
| Build a Knowledge Graph for AI Visibility (Wed 14:30) | Neo4j and Google AI Workshop | tangential | It builds knowledge graphs for agents to query, not for search engines to read. |
| One Source of Truth, both sessions (Wed 15:00) | Semantic Divides | tangential | Same shared-definition problem across teams, stated for product data rather than revenue data. |
| When Your Next Customer Is an Agent (Wed 15:30) | Bot and Agent Trust Management | partial | It covers verified agents and the Agent Payments Protocol, the admission and payment side of an agent as buyer. |
| Sentiment Analysis Pipeline (Wed 16:00) | REPL-Driven Ticket Triage | tangential | It surveys support tools that write a sentiment label with a confidence into ticket fields. |
| Real Marketing ROI: Canva (Wed 16:00) | Attribution audit | partial | It treats an incrementality holdout as the only measurement that can contradict six attribution models. |
| Build the Meta Ads Pipeline (Wed 16:30) | Google Tag Manager dataLayer Schema | tangential | One conversion-event taxonomy written as JSON Schema, SQL DDL, Avro and Protobuf; nothing on Meta or MCP. |
| Build a Governed Sales Agent (Wed 17:00) | AI Tinkerers Boston: GTM agents | partial | A production outbound agent got its reliability from deterministic code, structured memory and a guard against bans. |
| Build and Automate Flux Analytics (Thu 14:30) | Anomaly Detection Techniques | tangential | Z-score and IQR flagging of outliers; nothing on period-over-period variance or close. |
| Manage Costs with Tokenomics and FinOps (Thu 15:00) | LLM Cost Monitoring | partial | Token pricing, proxy spend logs and cost by use case for one operator. |
| Attribute and Optimize AI & Cloud Costs (Thu 17:00) | Agent Telemetry Systems | partial | It attributes tokens to work units and reconciles three spend counters; both sections are still speculative. |
Eighteen of the 44 sessions have a match: three strong, eight partial and seven tangential. The other 26 have none. Thursday is the weakest fit, with three of fourteen sessions matched and none strong; ERP, tax, close and the finance case studies have no counterpart here. Wednesday matches nine sessions, but mostly at the edges.
Agenda
Times are Eastern (EST). Speakers are listed where the agenda names them.
Tuesday 3 November: platform
| EST | Session | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 13:00 | The Next Frontier: Driving Efficient Intelligence in the Agentic Enterprise (opening keynote) | Sridhar Ramaswamy, Christian Kleinerman |
| 14:00 | State of Platform: Enterprise AI Readiness | Prasanna Krishnan |
| 14:00 | Secure and Govern Data & Agents Across Every Surface (broadcast) | |
| 14:30 | Build One Business Context for Every Agent, App, and Person | |
| 14:30 | State of Databases: A Fresh Foundation for Agents and Apps | |
| 15:00 | State of Data Engineering: Transforming into an AI-Native Team | Chris Child |
| 15:00 | Build an Interoperable Foundation: Cut Costs and Move Faster on a Single Data Copy (broadcast) | Jeemin Sim |
| 15:30 | Building the Sovereign AI Stack: Open Weights, Frontier Models, and the Enterprise Control Plane | Satya Nadella, Sridhar Ramaswamy |
| 16:00 | Autonomous Data Engineering with Snowflake | Sam Lachterman |
| 16:00 | State of Analytics and Intelligence: Agentic Analytics | Carl Perry |
| 16:30 | From Manual Tuning to Managed Outcomes: How Snowflake Automates Compute and Performance | |
| 16:30 | State of Application Development: From Data to Action | Unmesh Jagtap |
| 17:00 | Build and Ship Agentic Apps End-to-End on Snowflake | |
| 17:00 | State of Enterprise AI: Scaling the Next Frontier of Agents | Pavan Pothukuchi |
| 17:30 | State of Observability: Telemetry as a Data Asset | Jacob Leverich |
Wednesday 4 November: marketing and sales
| EST | Session | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 13:00 | Setting Up an AI-First Sales and Marketing Operating Model (keynote) | Denise Persson, Jon Beaulier, Rob Giglio |
| 14:00 | Beyond the Pilot: A Sales Leader's Playbook for AI Transformation | Sait Izmit |
| 14:00 | Build a Lead Scoring Model with Snowflake ML | Matt Loskamp |
| 14:30 | Beyond Keywords: Understanding Brand Visibility in AI Search | Tom Wilkinson |
| 14:30 | Build a Knowledge Graph for AI Visibility | Tom Wilkinson |
| 15:00 | Build One Source of Truth for Sales and Marketing Teams (broadcast) | Julie Zhu |
| 15:00 | One Source of Truth for Marketing, Sales, and RevOps: The Data and Context Behind Every Answer | Florian Delval |
| 15:30 | When Your Next Customer Is an Agent: The Road Ahead for AI in Enterprise Marketing and Sales | Colin Fleming, Denise Persson |
| 16:00 | Build a Sentiment Analysis Pipeline with Cortex AI Functions | Mike McCarver |
| 16:00 | Real Marketing ROI: How Canva Measures What Actually Drives Growth (broadcast) | |
| 16:30 | Build the Meta Ads Pipeline: Conversions API and Ads MCP in Snowflake | Luke Ambrosetti |
| 16:30 | Get More from Your Meta Investment with Data You Already Have | |
| 17:00 | Build a Governed Sales Agent with Snowflake CoCo | Matt Loskamp |
| 17:00 | Customer Zero: How Snowflake Empowered Sellers with 360 Sales Intelligence (broadcast) | Sait Izmit |
| 17:30 | Campaign Planning, Simplified: Build It with CoCo, Ask It with CoWork (lab, 1 hour) | Chanin Nantasenamat |
Thursday 5 November: finance
| EST | Session | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 13:00 | The AI Blueprint for Finance Teams (keynote) | Brian Robins |
| 14:00 | Beyond the Pilot: A Finance Leader's Playbook for AI Transformation | Brad Floering |
| 14:00 | From Weeks to Hours: Automating Finance Data Pipelines with CoCo Skills on Snowflake | |
| 14:30 | Build and Automate Flux Analytics | Ravina Sangtani |
| 14:30 | Customer Zero: How the Snowflake Finance Team Uses Snowflake to Scale | |
| 15:00 | Get Your Data AI-Ready: How to Access ERP Data with SAP Zero-Copy Integration | |
| 15:00 | How to Manage Costs with Tokenomics and FinOps | Maneesh Chhabra |
| 15:30 | The Finance Function, Reimagined: Leading Transformation in the Age of AI | Brian Robins, Steffan Tomlinson |
| 16:00 | Build and Deploy Agentic Finance Applications with Snowflake CoCo | Angela Lin |
| 16:00 | Transformation at Scale: How to Build an Agentic Tax Team | |
| 16:30 | Build an Agent-Powered Tax System | Shikha Bahi |
| 16:30 | From Fragmented Data to Finance Intelligence: The Northern Trust Story | |
| 17:00 | Attribute and Optimize AI & Cloud Costs in Snowflake | Sandra Herchen |
| 17:30 | Close Faster, Audit Smarter: Build It with CoCo, Ask It with CoWork (lab, 1 hour) | James Cha-Earley |
Questions to bring
- The business-context session says agents answer "confidently, but inconsistently" when five semantic views define one metric. Once an ontology declares the official definition, does the agent's answer name which definition it used, and how old the data under it is?
- Horizon Catalog promises that "every agent inherits security the moment it's deployed." Is the grant checked on every query, or fixed when the session starts? What revokes it mid-session?
- If telemetry lives in the warehouse, what is the ingest lag at P99, and does the observability UI show it?
- The cost-attribution pipeline catches anomalies "before close." What is the detection delay in days, and how does it compare with the provider bills it reconciles against?
Notes
Notes pending.