The New Standard for AI-Driven Decisions

The strategy is strong, but the insight you need—clear, live, decisive—is missing. It’s buried in dashboards. Stuck in backlogs. Trapped inside tools that promised acceleration, but only slowed you down. We were told things would be different. That self-service would finally work. That AI would bring clarity. That decisions could move at the speed of business. But the promise fell short. You invested in business intelligence. What you got was a backlog.

From Science Fiction to Factory Floor: The Physical AI Revolution Takes Shape

The robots we imagined in science fiction are no longer fiction. They’re optimizing power grids, managing transportation networks and supply chains, and transforming manufacturing floors. The question isn’t whether AI will reshape these and other industries. Rather, it’s how quickly organizations can bridge the gap between digital intelligence and physical reality to be among those leading the charge.

Apache Iceberg vs Parquet - File Formats vs Table Formats

When comparing Apache Parquet and Apache Iceberg, we need to first understand the differences between file formats and table formats. Parquet is a file format, whereas Iceberg is a table format. File formats focus on efficient storage and compression of data. They define how the raw bytes representing records and columns are organized and encoded on disk or in a distributed file system such as Amazon S3. The Parquet file format has become the de-facto standard for storing data used in analytics workloads.

Running Apache Iceberg For Financial Workloads At Affirm

Apache Iceberg unlocks the complex time travel requirements and intensive data validation needs that Affirm has as a financial company. Iceberg's write-once / read-anywhere paradigm simplifies Affirm’s governance by minimizing existing data sets — ensuring there is only ever one logical copy of a given data set, complete with a validation history, and tag-based time travel watermarks. This presentation recorded at Summit 2025 provides detail on the the way Affirm leverages Snowflake’s Open Catalog to power our Iceberg implementation, solving both operational and analytic challenges in the business.