With enterprises hungry for ways to use AI that won’t compromise their data, Snowflake is delivering the goods.
On Tuesday at the keynote for its annual Snowflake Summit conference in San Francisco, the company announced a flurry of new AI-powered updates to its enterprise platform. The big takeaway: These updates allow enterprises to leverage AI and agents with more context, without worrying about data vulnerabilities.
Here are the highlights:
Snowflake CoWork: Formerly called Snowflake Intelligence, the company has positioned the platform as a personal AI agent for knowledge workers, integrating data, context and tools into a single platform. Some of the new features include Cortex Sense, which brings together data, business definitions, and operational knowledge; User Memory, which allows users to schedule tasks and take actions with agents using tools like Gmail and Slack; and Skill Catalog, which lets users discover, share and reuse agent skills.Horizon Catalog: This is Snowflake’s central hub for AI governance, context and security. Horizon Context ensures that every person, tool, and AI agent operates from the same business definitions. Meanwhile, Adaptive Compute automatically optimizes compute resources and new security capabilities, such as verified agent identities, continuous security posture management, and automatic defenses against jailbreak attempts and zero-day vulnerabilities.Snowflake CoCo: The renamed coding assistant, formerly Cortex Code, can now run tasks autonomously, without requiring users to stay on their screens. Additionally, the company announced Datastream, which eliminates the need for data brokers, connectors, or data streaming infrastructure, allowing AI apps to continuously have access to fresh data.
“Our whole mission, our whole innovation train is based on the premise that we are the platform that will help organizations make everyone in the organization be more productive, and reinvent how they're able to work through the benefits of AI — but most importantly, do so being able to sleep well at night, because of security, because of compliance, because of governance overall,” Christian Kleinerman, executive vice president of product at Snowflake, told the media at a private round table that The Deep View attended last week.
Additionally, on Monday evening Snowflake revealed the fruits of its partnership with Anthropic, including significant momentum with Anthropic’s Claude models on Snowflake Cortex AI, the enterprise tech firm’s suite of AI products.
“Part of why we've chosen to primarily build for businesses, build for the enterprise, partner with Snowflake, is this concept that trust is an accelerant,” Anthropic President Daniela Amodei told Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy in the opening keynote for the Snowflake Summit on Monday evening. “Trust is something that helps you go faster. I've never had a customer meeting where the CEO said to me, ‘I would love if Claude could hallucinate more.’”
Our Deeper View #
Snowflake’s announcements seek to remove two key barriers to AI adoption: Seamlessness and trust. At the end of the day, the easier an AI tool is to adopt, the more likely it is to be used. Additionally, an AI system that doesn’t have access to a company’s context is limited in its ability to do anything beyond providing general answers, with unique, enterprise-specific data as the key differentiator. Snowflake’s partnership with Anthropic certainly doesn’t hurt — and could be symbiotic for both companies, giving Snowflake's AI repertoire more clout, while giving Anthropic a boost in enterprise trustworthiness and security posture. By getting rid of connectors and streaming infrastructure, putting in place security and governance guardrails, and forging partnerships with one of AI’s hottest frontier labs, Snowflake is positioning itself as the interface that allows enterprises to leverage, and more importantly, trust, frontier AI models.