Snowflake Intelligence: Talk to Your Data, Unlock Real Business Insights
Business users often struggle to get timely answers, navigating a maze of dashboards, reports and applications such as Salesforce, Confluence or Zendesk. Meanwhile, data teams are frequently buried under ad hoc requests, struggling to bridge the gap between vast data resources and the business's need for immediate, actionable insights. Artificial intelligence offers a path forward, especially through AI agents that can understand and act on complex business information. Yet unlocking the true potential of enterprise AI has proven difficult — a crucial challenge to overcome as AI fundamentally reshapes how businesses operate.
Business analysts face manual analysis, fragmented views and delays when trying to answer key business questions such as “Why are support tickets increasing?" or "Why are sales down?" With data scattered across structured tables, CRMs, documents, emails, support tickets and chat applications such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, accessing and reasoning across it securely has been a significant obstacle to providing timely insights to business users.
Today, we're thrilled to announce Snowflake Intelligence (in public preview soon), a transformative new experience designed to bridge the data-to-action gap. It empowers employees to securely converse with their data, derive profound insights from trusted enterprise information and initiate actions — all from a unified, intuitive interface.
Transform data into actionable intelligence
Snowflake Intelligence is a new agentic experience, accessible via a dedicated portal (ai.snowflake.com), built to help business users interact directly and securely with an organization's data. Teams can now use Snowflake Intelligence to:
Converse in natural language: Reason through questions and gain insights, just like with a trusted colleague.
Access all data: Securely connect to both structured data (tables and records) and unstructured data (documents, conversations and transcripts).
Generate accurate insights: With its built-in Deep Research Agent for Analytics, go beyond simple retrieval to analyze data, investigate complex business questions, uncover trends, and understand the "why" behind the "what."
Act instantly: Configure agents to perform tasks based on insights, such as sending notifications, updating records in other systems or triggering workflows.
A sales manager might ask, "What were my top product sales in the West region last quarter, and why did product X outperform product Y?" Snowflake Intelligence scans sales tables, pipeline notes and regional emails to deliver the answer and suggest next-step actions — all in one request, not a week of ad hoc analysis.
With Snowflake Cortex Knowledge Extensions (generally available soon) on Snowflake Marketplace, organizations gain a competitive advantage by easily contextualizing their proprietary data with up-to-date, relevant and trusted external sources such as Stack Overflow, The Associated Press, USA TODAY Network and more, enabling richer insights and more informed decision-making while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance. Leveraging Cortex Knowledge Extensions in Snowflake Intelligence, customers can maximize the utility of, and their insights into, these data sources.
Self-serve data exploration with intelligent agents
Snowflake Intelligence offers distinct advantages specifically designed for the complexities of enterprise data:
The ability to unlock deep insights from structured data: Most agentic solutions primarily focus on unstructured documents (with retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG). Snowflake Intelligence uses established technologies such as Snowflake Cortex Analyst to generate highly accurate SQL queries directly against a customer’s structured data in Snowflake, in addition to documents. It can reliably answer questions such as "Show me the healthcare claims trends over the past six months" by understanding data and business semantics, generating the correct queries, executing them securely and presenting the answer. It doesn't just find what happened; it can help a customer explore the why behind the what through intelligent context and deep analytical research.
Security and governance inherited, not replicated: Trust is paramount. Snowflake Intelligence is built on Snowflake's robust security framework. All existing role-based access controls, data masking policies and governance rules are automatically honored in every conversation. Users only receive answers based on data they’re authorized to access, eliminating the need to redefine permissions at the application layer. This seamless security helps ensure data integrity and prevents leaks without extra effort, while providing complete transparency into how insights are generated.
Unified access across the business ecosystem: True business insights require context from multiple sources. Snowflake Intelligence, combined with Snowflake's connectivity capabilities (such as Snowflake Openflow), can access and synthesize information from Snowflake and third-party applications. Consider an agent that can correlate product usage data (from Snowflake) with recent sales activity (from Salesforce) and customer support trends (from Zendesk). This comprehensive integration provides a holistic 360-degree view instead of requiring multiple single-purpose agents for individual applications, enabling true enterprisewide knowledge sharing.
Verifiable explainability and trust: Users should be able to trust the insights. Snowflake Intelligence is designed with transparency in mind. Users can understand how an agent arrived at an answer, track whether the data came from verified sources or queries curated by the data team, and trace the lineage. Administrators gain visibility into questions being asked and the relevance scores of the answers, allowing for continuous improvement and fine-tuning of the system throughout centralized control.
Real-world success with Snowflake Intelligence
We've been working closely with early customers who are already seeing the power of Snowflake Intelligence. WHOOP, the human performance organization, is leveraging Snowflake as a centralized platform for all its business data — from product and support to sales and marketing.
“At WHOOP, our mission is to unlock human performance and health span, and data is central to everything we do. Snowflake Intelligence marks a big step forward in our ability to be a data-first organization, ensuring that all employees can access insights without relying on analytics teams as the intermediary,” says Matt Luizzi, Senior Director of Business Analytics at WHOOP. “By eliminating the technical barriers to gleaning the insights we need for decision-making, our analytics teams can now shift from manual data retrieval tasks to more strategic, predictive and value-generating work.”
Democratize intelligence across the organization
Implementing Snowflake Intelligence unlocks significant value across an organization, allowing customers to:
Empower business users: Self-service insights allow users to get immediate answers to complex questions without needing technical skills or waiting for data teams. This enables faster, better decisions as users can act on reliable, comprehensive insights derived from across the business. This leads to increased productivity because less time is spent searching for data, and more time is spent acting on it, potentially initiating workflows directly from the conversational interface.
Elevate data teams: Data teams can now take a strategic focus by shifting from reactive ticket-taking to proactively enabling the business with curated data agents and strategic data initiatives. They can also maximize investment by leveraging the data, security and governance already established in Snowflake to deliver powerful AI capabilities. Finally, they can maintain control and visibility to configure agents, manage access, monitor usage, and ensure data quality and security standards are upheld through a seamless administrative experience.
Transform enterprise operations: This involves democratizing data securely, empowering more employees to leverage data insights within a secure and governed framework. This also means breaking down silos to foster collaboration and create a unified understanding by connecting data across departments and applications (e.g., enabling a true 360-degree view of the customer). Ultimately, this will accelerate innovation by fostering a data-driven culture where insights lead directly to action and measurable business impact.
Expand an organization’s knowledge universe with Cortex Knowledge Extensions and Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Snowflake Intelligence becomes even more powerful with Cortex Knowledge Extensions, which seamlessly integrate trusted external sources with first-party data. This capability allows organizations to:
Integrate external knowledge: Easily incorporate trusted external structured and unstructured data sources into a conversational AI experience, while maintaining proper attribution and respecting intellectual property.
Contextualize business insights: Enrich internal data with external market trends, industry research and specialized knowledge bases to provide deeper context for decision-making.
Maintain security and trust: Access external knowledge sources through Snowflake’s secure data-sharing framework, keeping all interactions governed and protected by the same robust security controls that safeguard customer data.
For example, a financial analyst could ask questions combining internal portfolio performance with external market news, while a product manager could analyze customer feedback alongside industry research reports, all within a single, secure conversation. Sources available as Cortex Knowledge Extensions on Snowflake Marketplace include The Associated Press, USA TODAY Network, Stack Overflow, Packt and CB Insights.
To enable such comprehensive insights from diverse data sources, organizations require easy connectivity between AI applications and various data systems. We are excited to share that Snowflake Intelligence will offer support for MCP servers (private preview soon), allowing users to securely retrieve information from a broad range of data sources. Business users will be able to select these remote data sources via the Snowflake Intelligence UI for reliable, richer responses. This easy access to governed data within a single, intuitive interface expedites decision-making, thereby creating a truly comprehensive knowledge ecosystem that transforms scattered data into clear business insights.
Get started with Snowflake Intelligence
The power to converse with enterprise data is no longer a future vision — it's here.
We invite business leaders seeking to empower their teams or data professionals looking to amplify their impact to explore Snowflake Intelligence. Discover how to talk to expert third-party sources and relevant publications and how to build specialized data agents for different business functions — such as a sales insights agent or a marketing campaign analyzer — all within the secure, governed environment of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.
Build your first Cortex Agent and work with your account team for access to the preview
Chat with the official Snowflake docs now through the Cortex Knowledge Extension: Snowflake Documentation from Snowflake Marketplace
Snowflake Intelligence transforms how organizations access and act on their data. By combining the power of conversational AI with Snowflake’s robust security, governance and comprehensive capabilities for both structured and unstructured data, we enable everyone to unlock valuable business insights through natural language. Talk directly to data, get trusted answers across the entire enterprise ecosystem, and turn information into actions. Discover the insights waiting within enterprise data today.
Forward Looking Statements
This article contains forward-looking statements, including about our future product offerings, and are not commitments to deliver any product offerings. Actual results and offerings may differ and are subject to known and unknown risk and uncertainties. See our latest 10-Q for more information.
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