Snowflake Summit 2026 runs June 1st – 4th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the agenda looks like a direct response to where enterprise AI adoption has stalled in production. The theme, “Making AI Real for Business”, is all about governance, context, security, and the infrastructure required to operationalize AI at enterprise scale.
This Snowflake Summit 2026 guide covers how to prioritize the conference if you’re a data engineer, analytics leader, IT decision-maker, or AI practitioner getting ready to attend. It also covers where to find CData, booth #2738 in the Snow Row partner zone, and what we’ll be demonstrating there to help make AI real for the business systems and data sources that sit outside most modern cloud architectures.
What the Snowflake Summit 2026 agenda signals
2026 looks to be one of Snowflake’s largest and most-AI centered events. There are more than 20,000+ expected attendees, with 500+ sessions running across 12 tracks, and over 190+ partner booths on the expo floor to keep all attendees busy and learning. The summit is headlined by a keynote that pairs Snowflake CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, with Anthropic Co-Founder and President, Daniela Amodei, giving a strong signal that the main conversation is the intersection of enterprise data infrastructure and production AI systems.
Cortex AI, Cortex Code, and Snowflake Intelligence are the conference’s primary product thread across the sessions, breakout labs, and keynotes being presented. These tools are Snowflake’s production-facing answers to how AI agents get access to enterprise data.
The 12 tracks cover Data Engineering and Pipelines, AI and ML, Analytics and BI, Cortex AI and Agents, Security and Governance, Snowpark and Developer, Data Sharing and Collaboration, Platform and Administration, and Industry Solutions, among others.
Sessions and themes worth tracking across the week
The keynote pairing of Snowflake and Anthropic highlights that the relationship between AI model providers and enterprise data infrastructure is the defining summit theme this year. AI model quality alone does not determine AI success. The challenge is giving those systems governed and reliable access to enterprise data that is spread across cloud data warehouses, business applications and operational systems.
The full agenda for the week highlights that tension, and the Cortex AI and Agents track is where you can find the most concentrated arguments on this theme. However, this is surfaced in other tracks like Data Engineering, Security and Governance, and the BI sessions.
Check out the full session catalog before you arrive to build out your schedule.
Additionally, the hands-on labs and training add-ons, GenAI Essentials, Snowflake Accelerator, and Platform Peak, offer certification credit but they fill quickly, so it’s worth registering before the conference opens. Expo hall theater sessions are 20 minutes and lower commitment than breakout sessions, offering a broad and efficient view of the partner ecosystem without blocking off full sessions.
Who should meet CData at Snowflake Summit 2026
CData is in the Snow Row partner zone at booth #2738 every day of the conference. Why you should stop by depends on what you’re trying to solve:
Data engineers and pipeline builders: if your work includes sources that Snowflake doesn’t natively support, Oracle, SAP, legacy on-premises databases, CData Sync covers that gap with automated ETL and CDC pipelines, native Snowflake COPY INTO support, Delta Lake and Iceberg support, and connection-based pricing that doesn't scale with row volume.
Data and analytics leaders: if you’re managing fragmented connectivity across multiple point solutions, CData Connect AI is the governed data layer that gives Cortex AI agents and analytics tools live, governed access to hundreds of sources, with connection-based pricing for no consumption billing variability.
AI/ML practitioners and agent builders: CData benchmarked MCP providers across 378 real-world prompts, and most returned incorrect results 15–42% of the time. CData Connect AI returned accurate results 98.5% of the time, because it models how each source system works rather than just translating API calls.
SaaS product leaders and ISVs: if your roadmap includes copilots, AI assistants, or agentic workflows that need to operate against customer data, CData Embed provides the connectivity layer without requiring your team to build and maintain connectors for every source.
The enterprise data access gap
Enterprise data environments rarely connect cleanly to a single platform's native connector catalog. The sources that matter most to AI initiatives that scale, legacy ERP systems, on-premises databases, and industry-specific applications, are often the ones that require additional connectivity work regardless of which cloud data platform sits at the center.
Cortex agents can only reason on data they can access. As those agents become autonomous and expand to cover operations, finance, supply chain, and other domains, the number of relevant source systems grows quickly. The most commonly missing sources, like Oracle, SAP ERP, on-premises databases, and many industry-specific applications, hit this gap on nearly every AI or analytics initiative.
Connectivity is a huge gap, but also only part of the problem. Different source systems model the same concepts in different ways, and an agent querying across multiple platforms inherits those inconsistencies immediately. Handling that correctly requires understanding how each system represents its data, not just connecting to it.
How CData addresses the gap
CData covers hundreds of sources, including most of what falls outside Snowflake's native catalog. The connector library is built on 15+ years of production development and trusted by Anthropic, Databricks, Microsoft, Google, and 10,000+ enterprise customers.
CData Sync delivers automated ETL/ELT and CDC pipelines into Snowflake from any source, including systems outside Snowflake's native catalog. Delta Lake and Iceberg support are included, with connection-based pricing that doesn't scale with row volume.
CData Connect AI is the managed MCP platform that gives Cortex AI agents and agentic workflows live, governed access to hundreds of sources with 98.5% accuracy. It includes source-system RBAC inheritance, audit trails, and SSO, so IT teams can approve AI data access without building a parallel governance layer.
CData Drivers provide secure and reliable connections to the same hundreds of sources via JDBC, ODBC, Python, MCP, and ADO.NET for pipeline development, BI tool connectivity, and embedded product integrations.
Frequently asked questions
What is Snowflake Summit 2026?
Snowflake Summit 2026 is Snowflake's annual user conference, running June 1–4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Over 20,000 expected attendees across 12 session tracks and 190+ partner booths.
Who attends Snowflake Summit 2026?
Attendees include data engineers, data scientists, analytics leaders, architects, IT and database administrators, software developers, security practitioners, and product leaders—primarily from enterprise companies in technology, financial services, healthcare, and consulting.
What is the theme of Snowflake Summit 2026?
"Making AI Real for Business." The conference agenda reflects a community that's moved past the question of whether enterprise AI works and is now focused on governance, data access, and production reliability.
What does CData do for Snowflake customers?
CData handles the connectivity work that sits outside the core data warehouse, getting data from legacy ERP systems, on-premises databases, and business applications into Snowflake via CData Sync, and giving Cortex AI agents live, governed access to those same sources via CData Connect AI.
Where is CData at Snowflake Summit 2026?
Snow Row partner zone, booth #2738, June 1st – 4th, at the Moscone Center. Book a meeting at cdata.com/ai or walk-up during expo hours.
Connect any enterprise source to Snowflake with CData
The CData team will be at booth #2738 at Snowflake Summit 2026, June 1–4. Whether you’re building pipelines from into Snowflake or enabling Cortex AI agents to work with live enterprise systems, the CData team will be demonstrating production-ready workflows designed for real-world enterprise environments. Stop by for a demo or start a free trial at cdata.com before the event.
Your enterprise data, finally AI-ready.
Connect AI gives your AI assistants and agents live, governed access to hundreds of enterprise systems — so they can reason over your actual business data, not just what they were trained on.
