Industry 2026: AI's Role in Transforming Retail, Finance, and Manufacturing with Rosemary DeAragon, Rinesh Patel & Tim Long, Snowflake

Rosemary DeAragon is the Global Head of Retail & Travel at Snowflake where she oversees the Retail, Consumer, Travel, & Hospitality verticals. She joined Snowflake after a five-year tenure at Walmart, where she led data strategy for the Chief Data Officer. Prior to Walmart, Rosemary worked in the transactions machine learning team at Amazon and before that, she was one of the first employees at InfoScout, which is now known as Numerator. Outside of work, Rosemary has served as a Board Director for companies spanning AI Automation, Supply Chain Technology, and global non-profit organizations. She holds degrees in Political Science and Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business where she serves as a Lecturer in Big Data Ethics.

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research, and consulting firm. Gardner, a leading identifier of software and cloud productivity trends and new IT business growth opportunities, honed his skills and refined his insights as an industry analyst, pundit, and news editor covering the emerging software development and enterprise infrastructure arenas for the last 18 years.Gardner tracks and analyzes a critical set of enterprise software technologies and business development issues: Cloud computing, SOA, business process management, business intelligence, next-generation data centers, and application lifecycle optimization. His specific interests include Enterprise 2.0 and social media, cloud standards and security, as well as integrated marketing technologies and techniques.Gardner is a former senior analyst at Yankee Group and Aberdeen Group, and a former editor-at-large and founding online news editor at InfoWorld. He is a former news editor at IDG News Service, Digital News & Review, and Design News.

Rinesh Patel is the Global Head of Financial Services at Snowflake where he is responsible for developing the financial service value proposition and supporting our customers' transition to an enterprise data strategy in cloud. Rinesh has been in the financial services industry for over 20 years in a variety of banking, consulting and business leadership roles with his most recent experience as Global Head of Cloud Platform at London Stock Exchange Company where he established and led a commercially-minded platform team to develop a modern cloud data platform to deliver new data solutions. Rinesh is based in London where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

Tim Long serves as the Global Head of Manufacturing at Snowflake. Manufacturers are looking to data and AI to create big gains in factory performance. Tim’s job is to identify where Snowflake can uniquely enable their pursuit, by sharing industry leading solutions powered by Snowflake, shaping Snowflake’s product roadmap for the future, and by connecting data across manufacturers, suppliers, partners, and customers in Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. Tim joined Snowflake from Adidas where he led the data and analytics function for North America. Before Adidas, he led the Enterprise Analytics and Data function for Micron Technology, a global semiconductor manufacturer.