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Today, data ecosystem giant Snowflake kicked off its BUILD developer conference with the announcement of a special new offering: Snowflake Intelligence.
Set to launch in private preview soon, Snowflake Intelligence is a platform that will help enterprise users set up and deploy dedicated ‘data agents’ to extract relevant business insights from their data, hosted within their data cloud instance and beyond, and then use those insights to take actions across different tools and applications, like Google Workspace and Salesforce.
The move comes as the rise of AI agents continues to be a prominent theme in the enterprise technology landscape, with both nimble startups and large-scale enterprises (like Salesforce) adopting them. It will further strengthen Snowflake’s position in the data domain, leaving the ball in rival Databricks’ court to come back with something bigger.
However, it is important to note that Snowflake isn’t the very first company to toy with the idea of AI agents for improved data operations.
Other startups including Redbird, Altimate AI and Connecty AI, are also exploring with the idea of agents to help users better manage and extract value (in the form of AI and analytical applications) from their datasets. One key benefit of Snowflake’s is that the agent creation and deployment platform will live within the same cloud data warehouse or lakehouse provider, eliminating the need for another tool.
What to expect from Snowflake’s data agents?
Ever since Neeva AI CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy took over as CEO, Snowflake has been integrating AI capabilities on top of its core data platform to help customers take advantage of all their datasets, without running into technical complexities.
From the Document AI feature launched last year to help teams extract data from their unstructured documents and to fully-managed open LLM solution Cortex AI to Snowflake Copilot, an assistant built with Cortex to write SQL queries in natural language and extract insights from data, Snowflake has been busy adding such AI features.
However, until now, the AI smarts were only limited to working with the data hosted within users’ respective Snowflake instances, not other sources.
How Snowflake Intelligence data agents work
With the launch of Snowflake Intelligence, the company is expanding these capabilities, giving teams the option to set up enterprise-grade data agents that could tap not only business intelligence data stored in their Snowflake instance, but also structured and unstructured data across siloed third-party tools — such as sales transactions in a database, documents in knowledge bases like SharePoint, information in tools like S …