Beyond ETL: Putting Data to Work with a Zero-Copy Architecture for AI
Webinar Speaker: Donald Farmer, Research Fellow
Date: Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Time: 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET
Enterprise investment in AI and analytics keeps climbing, and leaders now expect models that mirror how the business runs day to day. For many enterprises, much of that operational reality sits inside finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and customer records that carry decades of historical detail, business definitions, and data relationships. This data is essential to creating a competitive advantage with AI.
The traditional route to analytics copied that data into separate platforms through layer after layer of ETL. But each new process stripped out business meaning, multiplied costs, and created more fragile governance across tools.
With the growth of AI, and especially autonomous agents, business insight needs a different foundation: data that stays governed at its source while analytics and AI teams read it directly. Zero-copy access to a business data fabric keeps semantics, lineage, and quality rules intact, so the same governed data feeds planning, reporting, and machine learning, with no industry-specific warehouse to rebuild or silos of data to copy.
In this webinar, TDWI research fellow Donald Farmer and key industry and product experts from Snowflake discuss how organizations can modernize analytics and make their data AI ready in an enterprise‑ready environment with built‑in governance, performance, and scale, especially for SAP systems, without migration or duplication. Using real enterprise scenarios in demand forecasting, manufacturing, and retail, they will explore how governed data products move in both directions between SAP and the analytics environment, and where zero-copy access fits against selective replication when performance matters. Key takeaways:
- Why data silos and fragmented platforms stall AI and agent initiatives
- How zero-copy access keeps data governed while giving analytics and AI teams direct, real-time access
- What separates a business data fabric from traditional ETL integration
- How manufacturing and consumer-goods teams apply governed data to real business priorities
- How enriched insights return to planning and operational workflows as governed data products
Guest Speaker
Saptarshi Mukherjee
Senior Director of Product Management
Snowflake
Saptarshi (Sap) Mukherjee leads Data Ingestion Product Management at Snowflake, driving innovations in SaaS, streaming, data engineering and database integrations. With 20+ years in AI and analytics, Sap previously held leadership roles at Google and Microsoft. He holds a master’s in information management and a CS engineering degree.
Date: July 22, 2026
Time: 9:00 am PT
Donald Farmer