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At this year’s annual BUILD conference, data architecture giant Snowflake went all in to give its customers advanced capabilities, including some long-previewed features, to easily mobilize their datasets to build and share powerful AI applications.
The company debuted new tools for Cortex AI, its fully managed offering for developing conversational AI apps grounded in enterprise data hosted on its platform.
It also announced Snowflake Intelligence, enabling users to create ‘data agents’ that could not only answer questions related to structured (organized in tables) and unstructured data (PDFs, documents, etc.) on the platform but also take action across third-party platforms like Salesforce and Google Workspace using the generated answers.
Below is a rundown of all major announcements:
Cortex AI enhancements
Ever since its introduction last year, Cortex AI has been receiving regular updates from Snowflake to simplify how developers create and run AI apps.
At BUILD, Snowflake continued to bolster this offering with new multimodal input support for apps in development, managed connectors to integrate internal knowledge bases to the apps, and knowledge extensions to tie third-party documents, like news articles, to the services.
The company also announced Cortex Chat API combining structured and unstructured data into a single REST API call for fast-tracked RAG and agentic app development; observability for the developed AI apps (building on the TruEra acquisition); and support for SQL Joins and multi-turn conversations in Cortex Analyst to unlock richer insights from structured data.
Snowflake Intelligence
Using the enhancements to Cortex AI, including integration with internal knowledge bases, the company announced Snowflake Intelligence, a unified platform enterprises users can use to build ‘data agents’. T
The agents will use Snowflake-hosted business intelligence data as well as that connected via third-party platforms to provide users with instant answers to their business questions.
Further, once the insights are produced, the users can ask the same agent to act on them across integrated third-party tools.
This could involve a wide range of tasks across third party apps, from automatically and autonomously creating an edit …