By Ryoji Itako, Business Development Director, Korea & Japan, Acumen Intelligence
The keynote address on Day 2 of the Snowflake World Tour 2026 in Tokyo, consisted of a recap of the highlights from Day 1, a discussion between Jon Robertson, President of Snowflake APJ, and Sridhar Ramaswami, CEO of Snowflake. There were also presentations on enterprise case studies.
Mr. Sridhar presented a vision of the future centred on the “Agentic Enterprise,” in which AI agents will revolutionise corporate intelligence and business operations. He emphasised that CoWork/CoCo enables sales preparation and customer analysis to be completed in just a few minutes, and that productivity within Snowflake has increased by five to ten times.
He also pointed out that even large enterprises in Japan still rely heavily on on-premises environments, indicating significant room for efficiency gains. He expressed Snowflake’s commitment to accelerating migration and actively supporting key players in Japan.
Furthermore, Snowflake announced that it will begin offering its services in the Google Cloud Tokyo region in Q4 of FY27. This move strengthens Snowflake’s multi-cloud strategy and enables full-scale data integration on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which is expected to further enhance the company’s presence and credibility in the Japanese market.
Later, Mr. Matsumoto of Sumitomo Mitsui Trust presented a case study demonstrating how the company achieved both operational control and productivity by standardising and in-sourcing 650 business processes.
It was striking that moving complex operations onto the Snowflake platform actually strengthened control, suggesting a shift toward an era where individual knowledge and person-dependent know-how are no longer prioritised.
CyberAgent’s Mr. Chihro Ueno and Mr. Takahiro Yamauchi, presented a case study in which they established a culture of AI adoption across an organisation of 4,000 employees, yielding concrete business results such as a doubling of development output and improved sales efficiency.