Is the return on investment for generative AI far exceeding expectations? After surveying 1,900 enterprises and IT professionals worldwide, Snowflake found that the average ROI reached 41%! Complete report
Business users often struggle to obtain timely answers, having to navigate a maze of dashboards, reports, and various applications like Salesforce, Confluence, or Zendesk. Meanwhile, data teams are overwhelmed by ad-hoc requests, finding it difficult to bridge the gap between vast data resources and the urgent need for immediate, actionable insights. Artificial intelligence, especially AI agents capable of understanding and processing complex business information, points us toward a way forward. However, unlocking the true potential of enterprise-level AI has always been fraught with challenges—this critical hurdle needs to be overcome as AI fundamentally reshapes business operating models.
Business analysts often encounter delays when conducting manual analyses, facing fragmented information, and trying to answer key business questions such as &#34;Why is the volume of customer service tickets continuously rising?&#34; or &#34;Why are sales declining?&#34; With data scattered across structured tables, customer relationship management systems, documents, emails, customer service tickets, and chat applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams, securely accessing and reasoning across these data sources has become a significant barrier to providing timely insights to business users.
Today, we are excited to announce that Snowflake Intelligence will soon be open for public beta testing, a revolutionary new experience designed to bridge the gap from data to action. It enables employees to securely converse with data through a unified, intuitive interface, gaining deep insights from trusted enterprise information and immediately initiating actions.
<h2>Transforming Data into Actionable Intelligence</h2>
Snowflake Intelligence is a brand-new agent-based experience accessed through the dedicated portal ai.snowflake.com, aimed at helping business users interact with internal enterprise data in a direct and secure manner. With Snowflake Intelligence, teams can now:
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Use natural language conversations: Ask questions and gain insights as if communicating with a trusted colleague;
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Access all data: Securely connect to structured data (tables and records) and unstructured data (documents, conversation logs, and text transcriptions);
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Generate accurate insights: Go beyond simple retrieval with its built-in deep analytical research agent, analyzing data, exploring complex business issues, discovering trends, and understanding the root causes behind phenomena;
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Execute actions immediately: Configure the agent to perform tasks based on insights, such as sending notifications, updating records in other systems, or triggering workflows.
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A sales manager might ask, &#34;Which of my products had the highest sales in the Western region last quarter? Why did product X perform better than product Y?&#34; Snowflake Intelligence will automatically scan sales data tables, channel notes, and regional emails, providing not only answers but also next-step action suggestions—all accomplished with just one request
No need to spend weeks on ad-hoc analysis.
With the upcoming full launch of the Snowflake Cortex knowledge expansion feature available through the Snowflake marketplace, enterprises can easily contextualize and integrate their proprietary data with the latest, relevant, and credible data from authoritative external sources such as Stack Overflow, the Associated Press, and USA Today. This not only leads to deeper insights and more informed decisions but also ensures enterprise-level security and governance standards. By leveraging Cortex knowledge expansion within Snowflake Intelligence, customers can maximize the utility of these data sources and gain deeper business insights.
<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/news/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/news/null"/> https://static001.geekbang.org/infoq/2b/2bcaf641237220d120cf9be17b1480e2.png<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/news/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/news/null"/>
<h2>Agent-based Self-service Data Exploration</h2>
Snowflake Intelligence is designed to address the complexity of enterprise data and offers the following unique advantages:
Unlocking deep insights from structured data: Most agent solutions primarily focus on unstructured documents (using retrieval-augmented generation techniques). In contrast, Snowflake Intelligence, through mature technologies like Snowflake Cortex Analyst, can not only handle documents but also directly generate high-precision SQL queries for structured data in Snowflake. The system understands data semantics and business logic, reliably answering questions such as &#34;Show the trend of health insurance claims over the past six months&#34;—by securely executing queries and presenting results, it reveals not only &#34;what happened&#34; but also helps users explore &#34;the reasons behind the phenomena&#34; through intelligent context and deep analytical research.
Native inherited security and governance framework: Trust is crucial. Snowflake Intelligence is built on Snowflake's robust security framework, where all existing role-based access controls, data masking policies, and governance rules automatically apply to every interaction. Users can only access data results within their permission scope without needing to reconfigure permissions at the application layer. This seamless security mechanism ensures data integrity and prevents leaks while providing complete transparency in the insight generation process without additional investment.
Unified access across business ecosystems: True business insights require support from diverse data sources. Snowflake Intelligence, combined with Snowflake's connectivity capabilities (such as Snowflake Openflow), can access and integrate information from Snowflake and third-party applications. For example, the agent can combine product usage data (from Snowflake), recent sales dynamics (from Salesforce), and customer support trends (from Zendesk)
Conduct correlation analysis. This comprehensive integration provides a 360-degree panoramic view, eliminating the need to deploy multiple isolated agents for different applications, thus achieving true enterprise-level knowledge sharing.
Verifiable explanatory capability and credibility: Users must be able to trust the insights obtained. Snowflake Intelligence is designed with transparency as a core principle, allowing users to trace the conclusion generation path of the agents, verify whether the data comes from validated data sources or queries maintained by the data team, and track data lineage. Administrators can view the questions asked and the confidence scores of related answers through a centralized console, enabling continuous optimization and fine-tuning of the system.
<h2>Successful Practices of Snowflake Intelligence in Real Scenarios</h2>
We have closely collaborated with early customers who have experienced the powerful capabilities of Snowflake Intelligence. The human performance research organization WHOOP is using Snowflake as a unified platform for all its business data—covering the entire data chain of products, support, sales, and marketing.
“At WHOOP, our mission is to unlock human performance and extend healthy lifespans, and data is at the core of everything we do. Snowflake Intelligence marks a significant step towards becoming a data-driven organization, allowing all employees to access insights directly without relying on the analytics team as an intermediary. By breaking down the technical barriers to obtaining decision insights, our analytics team is freed from tedious manual data extraction work and can focus on more strategic, predictive, and value-creating tasks.”
<h2>Achieving Enterprise-Wide Intelligent Democratization</h2>
Deploying Snowflake Intelligence can release significant value for organizations, helping customers achieve the following goals:
Empowering business users: Self-service insight capabilities allow users to obtain answers to complex questions instantly without needing technical skills or waiting for the data team. By acting on reliable and comprehensive information across business domains, users can make faster and higher-quality decisions. This will enhance productivity—reducing data search time, increasing data-driven action time, and even enabling workflows to be initiated directly through conversational interfaces.
Enhancing the value of data teams: Data teams can shift from passive demand response to proactive empowerment by building curated data agents and strategic data projects to support business decisions. At the same time, they can fully leverage the existing data assets, security architecture, and governance systems of the Snowflake platform to maximize return on investment and deliver powerful AI capabilities. Finally, through a seamless management experience, teams can maintain control and visibility—configuring agents, managing access permissions, monitoring usage, and ensuring data quality and security standards are always compliant.
Transforming enterprise operating models: This means achieving data democratization within a secure and controllable framework, enabling more employees to utilize data insights. Additionally, by breaking down data barriers between departments and systems (for example, by building a true 360-degree customer view), it promotes collaborative cooperation and forms a unified understanding
Ultimately, by cultivating a data-driven culture—transforming insights directly into actions and measurable business impacts, the innovation process is comprehensively accelerated.
<h2>Expanding Organizational Knowledge Boundaries with Cortex Knowledge Expansion and Model Context Protocol (MCP)</h2>
Snowflake Intelligence enables more powerful intelligence through the Cortex knowledge expansion feature, seamlessly integrating trusted external data sources with first-party data. This feature allows businesses to:
Integrate External Knowledge: Easily incorporate trusted external structured and unstructured data sources into conversational AI experiences while ensuring proper source attribution and respecting intellectual property.
Provide Contextual Background for Business Insights: Enrich internal data with external market trends, industry research, and expert knowledge bases, providing deeper contextual support for decision-making.
Ensure Security and Trustworthiness: Access external knowledge sources through Snowflake's secure data sharing framework, with all interactions protected by Snowflake's consistently rigorous data security and governance policies.
For example, financial analysts can analyze internal portfolio performance alongside external market news in a secure conversation; product managers can simultaneously analyze customer feedback and industry research reports. Currently, Snowflake Marketplace offers data sources for Cortex knowledge expansion, including the Associated Press, USA Today Network, Stack Overflow, Packt, and CB Insights.
To achieve comprehensive insights from diverse data sources, businesses need to easily connect AI applications with various data systems. We are pleased to announce that Snowflake Intelligence will soon support MCP servers (private preview coming soon), allowing users to securely retrieve information from a wide range of data sources. Business users can select these remote data sources through the Snowflake Intelligence user interface, obtaining more reliable and richer answers. This convenient access to governed data through a single intuitive interface accelerates the decision-making process, thereby building a truly comprehensive knowledge ecosystem that transforms scattered data into clear business insights.
<h2>Start Snowflake Intelligence Now</h2>
The ability to converse with enterprise data is no longer a vision for the future—it has arrived.
We invite business leaders who wish to empower their teams and data experts seeking to expand their influence to explore Snowflake Intelligence together. Learn how to engage with expert-level third-party sources and relevant publications, and how to build dedicated data agents for different business functions (such as sales insight agents or marketing campaign analyzers) within the secure, governed environment of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.
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<li>Build your first Cortex agent and connect with your customer team for preview access</li>
<li>Immediately engage with Cortex knowledge expansion and the official Snowflake documentation: &#34;Snowflake Documentation&#34; in the Snowflake Marketplace</li>
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Snowflake Intelligence is revolutionizing the way organizations access and utilize data. By combining the powerful capabilities of conversational AI with Snowflake's comprehensive abilities in security, governance, and processing structured and unstructured data, we empower everyone to unlock valuable business insights through natural language. Directly converse with data, obtain trustworthy answers across the entire enterprise ecosystem, and turn information into action. Explore the insights hidden within your enterprise data now!
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Snowflake Intelligence is about to open public testing, aiming to help employees securely engage with data through a unified interface, gain deep insights, and take immediate action. According to Snowflake's survey of 1,900 business and IT professionals, the average return on investment for generative AI is as high as 41%. This tool will bridge the gap between data and action, addressing the challenges business users face in obtaining timely answers

Snowflake Intelligence: Engaging in dialogue with data to unlock real business insights | Technology Trends