AI data cloud company Snowflake, which is hosting its annual four-day Snowflake Summit in San Francisco, has made a slew of announcements related to product innovations. The latest announcements range from data engineering, compute performance, and analytics to agentic AI capabilities. With these, the company aims to break down data silos and bridge the gap between enterprise data and business action. And, all this without compromising control, simplicity, or governance.
The new announcements include Snowflake OpenFlow, Snowflake Standard Warehouse – Generation 2, Snowflake Adaptive Compute, Snowflake Intelligence, Snowflake Cortex AISQL, and Cortex Knowledge Extensions. Talking about the announcements, Vijayant Rai, managing director – India, Snowflake, said, “With our latest announcements, we’re showcasing how Snowflake is fundamentally redefining what organisations can expect from a modern data platform.”
Rai added that these innovations are focused on helping businesses make AI and machine learning workflows easier, connected, and trusted for users of all abilities by democratising access to data and eliminating the technical overhead that slows down business decision-making.
Snowflake OpenFlow is a multi-modal data ingestion service that allows users to connect to virtually any data source and derive value from any data infrastructure. It is now generally available on AWS, and it eliminates fragmented data stacks and manual labour by combining various types of data and formats, allowing customers to rapidly deploy AI-powered innovations.
When it comes to Snowflake Standard Warehouse – Generation 2 and Snowflake Adaptive Compute, the AI data company has introduced the next phase of compute innovations with a focus on delivering faster performance, enhanced usability, and stronger price-performance value. The Standard Warehouse – Generation 2 is now generally available and is essentially an enhanced version of Snowflake’s virtual Standard Warehouse with next-gen hardware and some additional enhancements to offer exceptionally faster analytics performance.
On the other hand, Snowflake Intelligence (public review soon) allows technical and non-technical users to ask questions in natural language and instantly gain actionable insights from both structured and unstructured tables or documents. The company has said that Snowflake Intelligence is powered by state-of-the-art language models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, and it is backed by Cortex Agents under the hood, which is delivered through an intuitive, no-code interface that helps provide transparency and explainability.
The company also introduced Data Science Agent (private preview soon), an agentic companion that enhances the productivity of data scientists by automating routine ML model development tasks. The Data Science Agent uses Anthropic’s Claude to break down problems related to ML workflows into easy steps like data analysis, data preparation, feature engineering, and training.
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Another highlight is the Cortex AISQL and SnowConvert AI as an expansion to Snowflake Cortex AI, which is the company’s suite of enterprise-grade AI capabilities. These could enable global organisations to modernise their data analytics to align with the present-day AI landscape. SnowConvert AI is an agentic automation solution that accelerates migration from legacy platforms to Snowflake. Meanwhile, Cortex AISQL brings generative AI directly into the customer’s query engines, allowing teams to extract insights across multi-modal data and build a flexible AI pipeline using SQL.
Among the slew of agentic products on Snowflake Marketplace are the Cortex Knowledge extensions, which allow enterprises to augment their AI apps and agents with proprietary unstructured data from third-party providers.