Snowflake launches platform upgrades to boost AI-driven insights
Snowflake has announced a range of new platform updates and partnerships aimed at enabling organisations to deploy agentic artificial intelligence (AI) applications at scale across their businesses.
The company has made Snowflake Intelligence, its enterprise intelligence agent, generally available to its more than 12,000 global customers. Snowflake Intelligence is designed to allow users to ask complex questions in natural language, putting advanced analytics and insights within reach of every employee across an organisation. This development is part of a broader set of enhancements to the Snowflake platform, including updates to its Horizon Catalog, Openflow, and an expanded set of developer tools for AI applications.
Enhancements to Snowflake platform
With advancements to Snowflake Horizon Catalog and Openflow, enterprises can now connect all types of data-structured, unstructured, and semi-structured-from disparate sources and catalogues. This helps enterprises address the challenge of data fragmentation and strengthens governance and interoperability throughout the data lifecycle. Snowflake states that its platform supports robust, secure, and vendor-agnostic environments intended to reduce dependence on any single technology stack.
Christian Kleinerman, Executive Vice President of Product at Snowflake, commented on the direction of these updates.
"For more than a decade, Snowflake has served as a cornerstone of global enterprises' data strategies. Our next evolution is about bringing AI to this data, allowing every customer to unlock intelligence that is uniquely their own. Our latest enhancements to the Snowflake platform make this possible, democratising the power of AI so every employee can make smarter and faster decisions, fundamentally changing how our customers will innovate for years to come."
The general availability of Snowflake Intelligence is one aspect of this evolution. The offering is built for scalability and trust, aiming to enable reliable data access and insights while ensuring governance and security. This capability is intended to help reduce decision-making guesswork and enhance data-driven cultures within enterprises.
In the last three months, over 1,000 Snowflake customers-including Cisco, Toyota Motor Europe, TS Imagine, and the USA Bobsled/Skeleton Team-have used Snowflake Intelligence to launch more than 15,000 AI agents across their organisations.
Thierry Martin, Head of Data and AI at Toyota Motor Europe, described the value the platform brings to their operations.
"Snowflake Intelligence has transformed our development timeline, reducing agent deployment from months to weeks. This has fundamentally shifted our team's focus from writing code, to prioritising what truly drives value: building rich business context and robust semantic models. The result is a significant competitive advantage - we're bringing secure, compliant data solutions to market faster, while eliminating data movement risks."
AI-driven insights and technical advancements
Snowflake Intelligence leverages AI models from vendors such as Anthropic and incorporates research from Snowflake's AI team, resulting in up to three times faster text-to-SQL queries and a new evaluation method called the Agent GPA (Goal, Plan, Action) framework. This framework reportedly identifies up to 95 percent of errors in standard datasets, achieving a high level of error detection.
Updates to Horizon Catalog offer a unified framework for security and governance, securing and connecting data across various regions, clouds, and formats while supporting open APIs like Apache Polaris and Iceberg REST Catalog. Openflow's general availability means that organisations can now automate data integration and ingestion from a variety of sources.
Additional advancements include Interactive Tables and Warehouses, near real-time streaming analytics in private preview, and expanding integration options through a partnership with Oracle that uses Openflow for near real-time change data capture and streaming. The recent acquisition of Crunchy Data has enabled the introduction of Snowflake Postgres, a managed Postgres database service, alongside the open sourcing of Postgres extensions called pg_lake.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery support for managed Iceberg tables is in public preview, aimed at enhancing data resilience across the enterprise lakehouse.
Developer tools and workflow integration
Snowflake has also introduced new developer tools that support workflow integration and collaborative code development. Cortex Code, in private preview, is a new assistant for interacting with Snowflake environments through natural language. Enhancements to Snowflake Cortex AISQL, now generally available, help build AI inference pipelines using SQL. AI Redact, in public preview, lets organisations detect and redact sensitive information in unstructured data, supporting privacy and compliance.
Workspaces, now available, provide a unified development environment with direct Git and Visual Studio Code integration. These features facilitate easier collaboration and code sharing among development teams. The launch of dbt Projects on Snowflake enables the in-platform management of data transformation projects.
Additionally, Snowflake now lets organisations run existing Apache Spark code securely with Snowpark Connect for Apache Spark, which is generally available. These capabilities are designed to offer flexibility and reduce complexity for development teams building AI-driven applications.
