Academic medical centers (AMCs) are a critical keystone of healthcare systems worldwide. They serve as major hubs of medical research, pioneering new treatments that advance and set the standard of care throughout medicine. They also educate and train the next generation of healthcare professionals, ensuring that the medical field continues to advance. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 230 active AMCs, and a significant number are part of a health system.

I’m happy to share that Snowflake has signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Secure By Design Pledge as we champion the advancement of industry standards for security in technology design. The CISA pledge to foster tech-ecosystem security deeply aligns with Snowflake’s own product design ethos, where security is built in from the start.

Snowflake Cortex Search, a fully managed search service for documents and other unstructured data, is now in public preview. With Cortex Search, organizations can effortlessly deploy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications with Snowflake, powering use cases like customer service, financial research and sales chatbots.

Over the last year, as Snowflake has focused on putting AI tools in the hands of its customers, we have prioritized easy, efficient and safe enterprise generative AI. With that in mind, we’re happy to announce the general availability of safety guardrails for Snowflake Cortex AI with Cortex Guard, a new feature that enables enterprises to easily implement safeguards that filter out potentially inappropriate or unsafe large language model (LLM) responses.

Let’s say you are building a house that you plan to put up for sale. You focus on an amazing design, beautiful entry, large windows for plenty of sunlight — things that will create a delightful experience for your future buyer. At the same time, the house also needs less glamorous but vitally important infrastructure, like plumbing, running water, electricity, heating, cooling and so on.

Today, Snowflake is excited to announce that the Llama 3.1 collection of multilingual large language models (LLMs) are now available in Snowflake Cortex AI, providing enterprises with secure, serverless access to Meta’s most advanced open source model. Snowflake offers the largest context window of any vendor, at 128k, for the Llama 3.1 collection of models.

A robust, modern data platform is the starting point for your organization’s data and analytics vision. At first, you may use your modern data platform as a single source of truth to realize operational gains — but you can realize far greater benefits by adding additional use cases. In this blog, we offer guidance for leveraging Snowflake’s capabilities around data and AI to build apps and unlock innovation.

A potential recipe for disaster proved to be the focus of every data executive’s agenda over the last year. A year ago many data leaders were caught off-guard. Employees embraced new gen AI tools with fervor, driving interest in all AI initiatives. Generative AI had penetrated the enterprise, with gen AI positioned in the Peak Of Inflated Expectation segment on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial IntelligenceI, 20231.

There is a scene in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation where Tom Cruise is hanging onto the outside of a jet as it has taken off. And while, yes, he’s going with it, he’s not really on board or in control. Some data executives feel like that. It’s not enough to establish goals — or, the destination in this metaphor. The data strategy must provide a flight plan for making sure you get there — on time, on budget and, of course, safely on board.

There is a growing recognition that insurers can introduce data, analytics and AI into virtually all of the important insurance functions and workflows, including product development, pricing and risk selection, underwriting, claims management, contact center optimization, distribution management, reinsurance, and understanding and shaping customer journeys. Here are some of the exciting ways insurance companies can put data to work.