According to Chris Child, vice president of product data engineering at Snowflake, 2026 will bring a fundamental change in the way businesses manage their digital assets. The coming months are set to finally end the phase where data engineers were seen solely as technical contractors. Instead of manually creating SQL queries, their role will evolve into strategic architects overseeing autonomous data pipelines.
This transformation is being forced by the growing disparity between the rate of data growth and the capabilities of human teams. The only answer to this problem is becoming intelligent automation. In the vision outlined by Snowflake, artificial intelligence ceases to be merely an enabler and becomes a fully-fledged partner, taking on the operational burden. This paves the way for an era of AI agent-based engineering, where specialists will verify and coordinate the work of algorithms instead of building code from scratch. Such a paradigm shift automatically positions data engineers higher in the decision-making hierarchy of companies. Since the quality of AI models depends directly on the quality of the data, those responsible for the infrastructure become key business partners, understanding not only the code but also the market context of the problems being solved.
In parallel to staff changes, the technology architecture itself is being redefined. The new battleground for competitive advantage is becoming the metadata layer. In 2026, it is the ability to unify management and search across distributed environments – not the sheer size of the data store – that will determine market leadership. Decoupling metadata from storage and computing power is becoming the standard required for transparency and speed.
Interestingly, this topic is coming directly to board meetings in the form of discussions about open data formats. Solutions such as Apache Iceberg are no longer just a technical preference for developers who value interoperability, but are becoming part of a business strategy to avoid vendor lock-in. Managements are recognising that open architecture is not only about lower costs and simplification of systems, but above all an insurance policy for future investments in artificial intelligence, guaranteeing the flexibility needed in a dynamically changing technological environment.
