Data warehousing giant Snowflake is holding its annual user and partner conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, this week. As with most infrastructure software vendors, the company emphasized the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) across its platform. Given Snowflake's focus on the enterprise, with almost 12,000 customers, the pitch of all the announcements had a singular message: Business analysts, the individuals who primarily work with the Snowflake database to get work done, can be the driving force behind both developing AI models and making predictions with those models. Also: Snowflake's new AI agents make it easier for businesses to make sense of their data Among the new features, ZDNET's Sabrina Ortiz relates that the chat mode lets one speak with the data, if you will, using natural language prompts. It is powered by OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs, along with Snowflake's own Cortex models.

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly central to the app-building process. At the same time, developers are awash in a rising wave of new AI tools, including agents. Now, Workday wants to help keep their heads above water. The company unveiled a suite of new AI features at its annual developer conference, Workday DevCon 2025, which kicked off on Monday. The announcements centered on a new developer toolset designed to help customers manage their ever-growing roster of AI tools within Workday.

Turning text into videos is one of the latest AI skills creating a buzz. And Microsoft is offering a free way to transform your ideas into quick video clips. Introduced on Monday, the Bing Video Creator is now accessible through the Bing mobile app and is coming soon to Bing on the desktop and Copilot Search. "Bing Video Creator represents our efforts to democratize the power of AI video generation," Microsoft said in its blog post. "We believe creativity should be effortless and accessible to help you satisfy your answer-seeking process."

Snowflake kicked off its annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, on Tuesday. The cloud-based data-storage company launched a slew of new features. The biggest highlight was agentic AI solutions that help organizations better make sense of their data: Snowflake Intelligence and Data Science Agent. With the rise of agentic AI, Snowflake is the latest company to embrace the burgeoning technology to optimize how companies sort, analyze, and understand their data. AI chatbots have risen in popularity because they make it easy to find what you are looking for using a simple, conversational text prompt.

Data is the fuel behind the AI revolution -- the foundational building block for the new technological world order. But data is immaterial, difficult to organize, and subject to an ever-growing mountain of walled gardens and regulatory decrees. Businesses seeking to harness AI, therefore, often struggle to make the most of their data, this most vital of resources. At its annual Snowflake Summit user conference, the company announced the release of Openflow, a new service designed to integrate businesses' data into a single, unified, and intelligible channel. Like disparate streams flowing into a single river, Openflow takes the whole of a company's data -- structured, unstructured, batch, and streaming -- and collects them in such a way that they can be more easily visualized and leveraged.

NICE, a leading provider of contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions, today announced its new branding. The company has rebranded to NiCE, and one of the many factors driving this rebranding is emphasizing'intelligence' (a hallmark of AI) in customer conversations, with'i' marked in lower caps to stand out. During an exclusive analyst meeting, the company's leadership team also announced that the new brand will emphasize the human touch. Also: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be your'super assistant' - what that means The emphasis on human touch is noteworthy because the company wants to reposition itself from being a leading CCaaS provider to an AI company under the leadership of new CEO, Scott Russell. Given that shift, the reference and emphasis on human touch are particularly important.

People may not be willing to pay for AI, but they're certainly willing to use it. How they use AI, though, seems to be changing. A new study from consultancy Accenture reveals some insights into how consumers perceive and use AI, and it's seen as a lot more than just a tool for work. Instead, AI is becoming a personal influencer that users want to have a relationship with. Also: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be your'super assistant' - what that means The numbers from this study show that as AI improves, people are rapidly trusting it with their personal lives.

Google is cooked ... cooked like a luxurious, rich, decadent, yet tender steak on the Fourth of July. I know that sounds dramatic, but we could be witnessing the slow demise of Google as we know it. Testifying in Google's antitrust trial, Apple's head of services, Eddy Cue, confirmed that fewer iPhone users are using Google Search on Safari and are instead turning to AI. Now, before you think I'm writing Google's obituary, let me be clear. Like I've said before, I'm confident they'll figure it out, even if that means changing their business model.

Samsung has been offering its mobile customers a robust selection of Galaxy AI features via integration with Google Gemini. A deal with Perplexity AI may soon expand the AI features on Samsung devices. On Sunday, Bloomberg published a report informed by persons close to the matter about a wide-ranging deal between Samsung and AI startup Perplexity AI, which would preload Perplexity's app and assistant on future Samsung devices. Perplexity's AI search engine would also be plugged into the Samsung web browser, giving users easy access to AI-powered browsing. Also: How much energy does AI really use?

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is only a week away. The WWDC 2025 kicks off on Monday, June 9 at 10 a.m. The event will feature the new software generation for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple TV. This developer conference also marks one year since the company entered the AI space with the announcement of Apple Intelligence. As a result, all eyes are on Apple and its much-awaited updates on the progress of Apple Intelligence, such as when the upgraded Siri update will be rolled out to devices and what new features will be coming next.