How Leading Companies Are Putting AI to Work: Customer Stories From Expedition 2026

The most convincing case for enterprise AI comes from the organizations that have already put it to work. At Snowflake Expedition 2026, leaders from media and entertainment, consumer technology, financial services, payments and professional services described how they moved AI from pilot to production, which problems they chose to solve first and what changed for their businesses as a result.

Regardless of industry, each organization treated AI as a change in how the business operates, invested first in governed and trusted data and made sure humans made critical decisions and approvals. If you lead a function, a business unit or an entire company, these six sessions offer a realistic view of what an AI-first organization looks like today. You can also find more customer stories — along with strategy and skill-building sessions — in the Expedition on-demand agenda.

The executives in these sessions approached AI as a shift in operating model that touches strategy, teams and accountability. They also brought peers from across the business into the conversation early.

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy and Executive Vice President of Product Christian Kleinerman opened Expedition with live, cross-functional demonstrations of business and technical teams taking action directly where their work happens. Andre Rohe, Executive Vice President of Product Engineering at Disney Entertainment & ESPN, joined to share a Fortune 500 perspective on running AI on one open, governed foundation. For executives, this keynote sets the context for every other session on this list, because it shows how a single platform can serve every function rather than a collection of separate tools.

Watch “The Next Frontier: Driving Efficient Intelligence in the Agentic Enterprise” now.

Rob Giglio, Chief Customer Officer at Canva, joined Snowflake's CMO Denise Persson and CRO Jon Beaulier to discuss what it takes to build AI-first marketing and sales teams. Rob shared how Canva connects marketing and sales and how he thinks about leading customer-facing teams as AI takes on more of the work. Executives from all functions who must decide how responsibilities should shift between people and AI across teams will find a useful model here.

Watch “Setting Up an AI-First Sales and Marketing Operating Model” now.

Steffan Tomlinson, CFO of Stripe, spoke with Snowflake CFO Brian Robins about building an AI-first finance and operations organization. Their conversation covered how to sequence investment and measure ROI as AI moves into production, and which human skills become more valuable as automation expands. It’s an inside look at the CFO's perspective on balancing speed with the accuracy and auditability the business depends on.

Watch “The Finance Function, Reimagined: Leading Transformation in the Age of AI” now.

In nearly every customer story at Expedition, progress began with the data. These sessions show how three organizations created trusted data that could be shared across organizations before scaling AI on top of it.

Canva replaced static attribution reports with holdout experiments and a unified measurement model built on Snowflake, giving its marketing teams one trusted view of what drives revenue. Matthew Castino, Canva's Marketing Measurement Science Lead, explains how that view helps the team cut wasted ad spend and scale the campaigns that work. Executives who approve marketing budgets will see how better measurement turns budget debates into decisions grounded in evidence.

Watch “Real Marketing ROI: How Canva Measures What Actually Drives Growth” now.

Gretchen Goers, SVP and Head of Finance Data and Automation at Northern Trust, describes how the global financial institution is modernizing its finance function. She explains the data challenges that prompted the change, the use cases the team prioritized and how trusted data and AI are reshaping finance work. Leaders in regulated industries will value the candid account of what worked, what the team learned and what comes next.

Watch “From Fragmented Data to Finance Intelligence: The Northern Trust Story” now.

EY's Daren Campbell and Channing Flynn share how organizations are moving tax operations onto a unified tax data hub that serves as a single source of truth across compliance, provision, transfer pricing and forecasting. Their "transform once, reuse everywhere" approach applies well beyond tax, and any executive weighing whether to rebuild data for each new AI use case will find the principle worth considering.

Watch “Transformation at Scale: How to Build an Agentic Tax Team” now.

Snowflake's own teams appeared throughout the event as the first users of the products the company sells. If you want to go deeper, three more sessions show that work in detail: “How Snowflake Empowered Sellers with 360 Sales Intelligence” covers how Snowflake built Raven, an assistant that gives sellers reliable account insights.

“How the Snowflake Finance Team Uses Snowflake to Scale” shows how Snowflake's finance team consolidated ERP, planning and reporting on one platform.

“How Snowflake Empowered Sellers with 360 Sales Intelligence” describes how Snowflake's Internal Audit team moved from sampling to continuous, AI-driven assurance with humans in the loop.

Each of these success stories depends on the teams that build and run the underlying systems. Expedition's Builders track gave those teams hands-on guidance, and these sessions connect most directly to the customer stories above.

• Secure and Govern Data and Agents Across Every Surface covers governance across data and agents, the foundation behind every story here.
• Build One Business Context for Every Agent, App and Person explains how to give every agent and team the same business definitions.
• Build and Ship Agentic Apps End-to-End on Snowflake shows how to take an AI application from prototype to production.
• Build One Source of Truth for Sales and Marketing Teams is the technical companion to the Canva and GTM stories. It shows you how to build a Semantic View that holds both the account and opportunity data and the definitions of that data that enables a consistent understanding.
• Build and Deploy Agentic Finance Applications with Snowflake CoCo shows how Snowflake's finance analytics team builds and ships agentic finance applications. It’s the technical companion to the Northern Trust and Snowflake finance stories.

No matter your industry, business size or location, you’re likely to find an AI challenge you have in common with the organizations presenting at Expedition 2026. Explore the Expedition on-demand agenda for inspiration, advice and expertise to help you deploy AI with confidence.