Snowflake Inc. entered the artificial intelligence (AI) fray Tuesday with agents it says bridge the gap between enterprise data and business processes, making AI and machine learning (ML) workflows easier and more connected.
Snowflake Intelligence offers a unified conversational experience, propelled by intelligent data agents, to ask natural language questions to instantly uncover actionable insights from both structured tables and unstructured documents. The company also announced Data Science Agent, an agentic companion that boosts data scientists’ productivity by automating routine ML model development tasks.
“AI agents are a major leap from traditional automation or chatbots, but to deploy them at scale, businesses need an AI-ready information ecosystem,” Baris Gultekin, head of AI at Snowflake, said. “This means enterprises must be able to unite data silos, maintain enterprise-grade security and compliance, and have easy ways to adopt and build agents. This isn’t just about accessing data, it’s about empowering every employee to make faster, smarter decisions with all of their business context at their fingertips.”
Snowflake Intelligence oversees security controls, data masking and governance policies automatically. It unifies data across sources, including Snowflake, Google Drive, Box Inc., Workday Inc., Zendesk Inc. and others under the new Snowflake Openflow to coordinate insights from spreadsheets, documents, images and databases simultaneously.
During a raucous keynote presentation Monday night that featured a Q&A with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, he predicted that by next year he foresees AI agents that perform as scientists and discover new knowledge. With more computing power, he sees AI “solving our hardest problems” within organizations.
“Businesses will be able to do things that weren’t possible,” he said. Altman also referred to 2025 as an “inflection point” for AI.
For IT, chief information security officers, and everyone across the board, there are always concerns over security and governance. Not only is enthusiasm greater than before but governance is being re-emphasized, Artin Avanes, head of core data platform at Snowflake, said in an interview. “When I hear orchestration of AI, I think of workflows,” he said.
Snowflake Intelligence, which is running on large language models (LLMs) from Anthropic and OpenAI, resides within the Snowflake perimeter and is powered by Cortex Agents.
“By integrating Claude’s reasoning capabilities directly into Snowflake’s platform, we’re further eliminating the traditional barriers between data and insights. Business users can now have natural conversations with their enterprise data, while data scientists can automate complex ML workflows — all through simple natural language interactions,” Michael Gerstenhaber, vice president of product management at Anthropic, said. “This demonstrates how Claude’s advanced reasoning can democratize AI while maintaining the enterprise-grade security and governance that organizations require.”
