Snowflake jumps on the agent bandwagon during its Build 2024 conference and launches Snowflake Intelligence. This platform must unlock data for use with autonomous AI agents.

Snowflake is introducing Snowflake Intelligence at its virtual Build 2024 conference. This is a new platform that is built on the company’s data cloud. Snowflake Intelligence allows customers to create agents. These are AI-controlled processes that can act autonomously based on customer data.

Agents in the cloud

Snowflake provides customers with a data cloud where they can securely store all of their data. In this cloud, users manage access rights to data and make it available to anyone or any user without the data ever being copied. This way, data and policies remain inextricably linked.

Snowflake uses these capabilities to also give customers the ability to share certain data with third parties or, conversely, to integrate third-party data into their own data cloud. Imagine a business that drives forecasting algorithms with external weather data. Built on this cloud platform, Snowflake Intelligence enables customers to create AI-based automations that work with their own data in the same secure way.

Snowflake can process real-time and transactional data so that it is also available via the intelligence platform. Snowflake also offers connections to third-party tools. Think of documents in SharePoint, Google Workspace tools, or Salesforce solutions including Slac. Snowflake Intelligence also supports APIs, allowing users to connect an AI agent to other external tools as well.

Focus on unlocking information

The new platform allows users to ask questions about all of their data. Agents will then work to find answers from various sources. Agents are more than co-pilots, meaning they can also take action based on the data. The agents’ focus currently appears to be on analysis, summaries and text generation. This is a more limited view of the concept than, for example, Salesforce, where agents can be assigned specific tasks based on the data, comparable to those of a human.

Snowflake Intelligence is based on Snowflake Cortex AI, the system that securely binds data to AI tools. At the heart of the entire story remains the management layer, ensuring that data is never copied and access and security rules always remain in effect. So it’s not the case that sensitive data is suddenly accessible in a roundabout way because it has been linked to an AI solution.

The right direction

Snowflake Intelligence is a relevant but also necessary solution for Snowflake. Data and AI are two chapters of the same story. Snowflake provides an excellent data foundation that makes many things possible, but this approach also has its limitations. Those in the Snowflake ecosystem are limited to the capabilities of that ecosystem. In other words, Snowflake cannot lag behind in terms of AI functionality, because then the data cloud suddenly becomes a data prison.

With Snowflake Intelligence, the company unlocks the data in the data cloud for customers who want simple but powerful AI functionality. This is consistent with Salesforce’s vision we heard earlier this year, although Snowflake’s definition of agents currently appears to be more limited than Salesforce’s. How does Snowflake find the right solutions quickly? After all, many AI-related features were already possible with Cortex AI. Snowflake Intelligence will be available in private preview soon.