Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

One line from Snowflake Summit 2026 stood out above everything else. Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake: "We do not want any of you spending money with Snowflake, in any use case, if you are not getting more value in return." It's a refreshing commitment, and it points directly at the cost efficiency conversation we've been having with customers around open lakehouse architectures. Here's the core argument: data movement doesn't directly generate value.

There's a pattern we see repeatedly in enterprise AI projects. A team identifies a compelling use case. They build the model. They staff the project. Then they spend the next six to eighteen months trying to solve a problem that was never on the roadmap: their data isn't ready. Not because it doesn't exist. It exists everywhere: in cloud warehouses, on-premises databases, SaaS platforms, and data lakes across multiple regions.

There’s a moment in every data team’s journey when a bill arrives with unexpected costs. It might be an egress charge you didn’t see coming, a query cost that spiralled when usage spiked, or the quiet realization that migrating your data to a different platform would take months of work and a significant budget. If you’ve been there, you know what vendor lock-in really costs, and it’s not just dollars.

At Qlik Connect, one question kept coming up in conversations with leaders: “Which AI vendor should we pick?” But I think that’s the wrong starting point. The better question is: What kind of company do you want to become over the next three years? Right now, most organizations are heading down one of two paths with AI. Some are bolting it onto existing workflows to improve efficiency.

What marketing mastered years ago, product teams are only now beginning to understand. For decades, marketing has operated on a simple but powerful principle: don't make your customers come to you, go to them. Meet them on the channels they already use, speak in the language they already speak, and show up where they already spend their time. The result was omni-channel marketing, a discipline that transformed how brands engage with the world.