Geospatial data can give a business a competitive edge — especially when it’s combined with the company’s own data resources. Considering a new store location? You’ll want to analyze not just where your nearest competitors and potential customers are, but also retail footfall numbers, historical traffic patterns, distance from distribution centers, environmental factors, potential delivery times to customers and more. You need geospatial data to make it all happen.

Last year, we held our first Accelerate event, to explore industry trends, data and technology innovations, and data strategy case studies in financial services. This year, we are expanding to five industry events, featuring leaders in financial services; retail and consumer goods; manufacturing; media, advertising and entertainment; and healthcare and life sciences. Accelerate Financial Services and Accelerate Retail are one-day virtual events brought to you by Microsoft.

It’s no surprise that ever since ChatGPT’s broader predictive capabilities were made available to the public in November 2022, the sprawl of stakeholder capitalization on large language models (LLMs) has permeated nearly every sector of modern industry, accompanied or exacerbated by collective fascination. Financial services is no exception. But what might this transformation look like, from practical applications to potential risks?

Cyberattacks are devastating, especially when they derail real-world critical services like healthcare. An especially troubling attack field is ransomware: In 2022, 66% of U.S. hospitals were targeted in ransomware attacks, an increase of almost 50% from 2021, and 289 hospitals were affected by successful ransomware attack incidents. Healthcare organizations paid the ransom in about 61% of ransomware incidents, the highest rate of any industry.

As Large Language Models are revolutionizing natural language prompts, Large Vision Models (LVMs) represent another new, exciting frontier for AI. An estimated 90% of the world’s data is unstructured, much of it in the form of visual content such as images and videos. Insights from analyzing this visual data can open up powerful new use cases that significantly boost productivity and efficiency, but enterprises need sophisticated computer vision technologies to achieve this.

Because human-machine interaction using natural language is now possible with large language models (LLMs), more data teams and developers can bring AI to their daily workflows.

Did you know that approximately two thirds of Snowflake customers capture the latitude and longitude of some business entity or event in their account? While latitude and longitude columns can often be used by BI tools and Python libraries to plot points on a map, or shade common administrative boundaries such as states, provinces and countries, companies can do so much more with this valuable geospatial data to perform complex analyses.

Snowflake Marketplace is a vibrant resource, with hundreds of providers offering thousands of ready-to-try or ready-to-buy third-party data sets, applications and services. Many of these providers make their products available on Snowflake Marketplace for Snowflake customers to purchase — and they use our integrated Marketplace Monetization capabilities to simplify the process and speed up procurement and sales cycles.

A lot of the buzz around AI focuses on its future potential. And we get it — we’re talking about a transformative technology that presents seemingly limitless possibilities. But an important aspect of this world-changing tech story that gets lost in the hype is understanding exactly what AI solutions are available for you and your team to employ right now, today.

We previously announced Snowflake’s Unistore workload, which continues Snowflake’s legacy of breaking down data silos by uniting transactional and analytical data in a consistent and governed platform. Today, we are pleased to announce that Hybrid Tables — the core feature powering Unistore — is in public preview in select AWS regions. Hybrid Tables is a new table type that enables transactional use cases within Snowflake with fast, high-concurrency point operations.