As we enter the artificial intelligence summit season, two pivotal events, Snowflake Summit and Databricks’ Data+AI Summit offer a rare lens into how the battle for the future of enterprise AI is unfolding.

These are not just product showcases. They are directional signals that will shape how businesses organize around data, logic and automation over the next decade.

For chief technology officers, chief information officers and technology decision-makers, the stakes have never been higher. At the heart of this shift lies what we at theCUBE Research call the System of Intelligence — a dynamic layer that integrates data, business logic, machine learning and autonomous agents to drive outcomes, not just insights.

Why this matters now

Traditional business intelligence dashboards that drove the mobile software-as-a-service wave are now considered siloed analytics platforms and are no longer sufficient. The demands of generative AI, real-time decision-making and business agility are putting pressure on platforms to do more than observe. They must take steps and be intelligent, acting with authority or agency.

My research and reporting we are seeing a new “supercycle” around a three-layer enterprise architecture:

1. System of Record (SoR): Where transactions and master data live
2. System of Intelligence (SoI): The intelligent-data-layer logic that interprets, learns, and recommends
3. System of Authority/Agency (SoA): Where agents, human or autonomous, take action

Whoever owns the “intelligent data layer” will control how decisions are made and executed at scale. This is the new “holy grail” in AI and agent systems and software.

What to watch at Snowflake Summit

If you’ve been reading and following SiliconANGLE, theCUBE and the recent Cube Research real-time insights, you would know that Snowflake’s big question this year isn’t about storage or SQL performance. It’s whether Cortex Agents, paired with Horizon governance and a maturing metric store, can elevate Snowflake from an analytics layer to the operating system for enterprise data workflows.

You should be looking for clarity on:

• How Snowflake plans to unify structured and unstructured logic in real-time
• If Cortex will move beyond search and SQL to drive automated workflows
• Whether the platform will offer native integration hooks to execute actions, not just recommend them
• The data engineering innovation around the modern notion of data warehouse platforms that employ massive data ingest, reasoning and intelligence
• Aggressive go-to-market value propositions around Enterprise AI

What to watch at Databricks Data+AI Summit

Databricks already owns the hearts of data engineers and ML developers. But the challenge now is whether Unity Catalog can evolve into a true business control plane — and if Mosaic AI can bridge the gap between flexible agent development and enterprise execution.

Key signals to track:

• Is Databricks building a true metric tree to track the cause relationship between different inputs and outcomes? Look beyond the metadata but identify new capabilities of causal reasoning to track across multi-step reasoning to identify new usage and model efficiencies.
  
• Can the lakehouse paradigm support operational decisions in real time?
• Will the platform introduce native, agent-driven workflows that go beyond model training?

Strategic considerations for innovation and technology leaders

1. Lock-in is shifting from infrastructure to logic.
   The new switching cost isn’t your cloud provider, but it’s your metric definitions, agent workflows and feedback loops. 
2. Platform design matters more than features.
   Look for coherence in governance, semantics and extensibility. Avoid fragmented AI bolt-ons for integrated data systems.
3. The control loop is now a business asset.
   Vendors that embed agents into decision loops and monetize based on outcomes will reset software economics. This will be a driver for agents over traditional SaaS software thinking. System thinking will extend to business logic.

The data angle

At SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, we’ve seen a fundamental inflection point in enterprise architecture. The AI era isn’t just about smarter software — it’s about intelligent systems that close the loop among data, decision and action.

The Snowflake and Databricks events will test which vendors are ready to operationalize this vision. The competition between Databricks and Snowflake represents a strategic chess match in the data cloud market with differing philosophies on growth models, open-source integration, governance frameworks, pricing strategies, technological innovation, market dynamics and leadership challenges shaping their respective paths forward in this rapidly evolving landscape.

We’ll be on the ground covering both events in depth. If you’re a CTO, CIO or digital transformation leader, these are the moments to tune in. Watch this space on SiliconANGLE theCUBE Podcast TV and theCUBEresearch.com.

The future of enterprise AI will be researched, analyzed and podcasted. 

Some commentary on theCUBE Podcast from last year on Databrick’s Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, and Mosaci AI Suite.

Follow me at:

x: @furrier 

insta: @johnfurrier 

LinkedIn: John Furrier

Check out this week’s theCube Pod:

Photo: Sarbjeet Johal/X