Snowflake Partners with Anthropic to Launch AI Agents for Enterprise Data Intelligence

Snowflake partners with Anthropic to release its first AI agents - SiliconANGLE

Snowflake partners with Anthropic to release its first AI agents Snowflake Inc. today launched agentic artificial intelligence capabilities that allow users to query combinations of structured and unstructured data using enhanced versions of its Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search query tools in combination with the Claude 3.5 Sonnet large language model from Anthropic PBC. AI agents are autonomous systems that perceive their environment, process information and take actions to achieve specific goals. They use a combination of machine learning, natural language processing and reasoning techniques to make decisions and recommendations with minimal human supervision. That makes them a step beyond generative AI, said Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake's executive vice president of product. "The one-question-one-response pattern may have been sufficient for some tasks, but once you can do multistep reasoning-based workflows, you can start to dream of what is possible," he said. Snowflake said its foray into agentic AI is predicated on delivering high accuracy levels, trusted results and governed access to data across a variety of sources. Trust has been a major factor in enterprise deployment of AI in general because models are nondeterministic, meaning they don't always deliver the same outputs in response to the same inputs. Accenture Plc's 2025 Tech Vision report found 80% of business leaders believe trust needs to be part of their organizations' technology strategy. Cortex Agents, a feature now in public preview, orchestrates structured and unstructured data sources ranging from Snowflake tables to PDF files, breaks down complex queries, retrieves relevant data and generates answers. Agents use Cortex Analyst to operate on structured data while Cortex Search mines through unstructured sources. LLMs analyze and generate answers. In a demonstration, Snowflake executives showed how the agentic system can answer questions such as "How many insurance claims are currently open and how many are $10,000 or higher?". Processing that query requires extracting data from unstructured documents and converting them into a structured form for a SQL operation. Executives said Cortex Agents can automatically determine the best way to retrieve information. For example, a request to list all the appraisal clauses related to snowmobiles across all insurance contracts automatically generates a Cortex Search function that retrieves the information across multiple data sets. Agents can analyze different possibilities before selecting an option if queries are ambiguous and can split a single request into multiple subtasks and assemble partial responses into a single result. They route across multiple semantic models and search indices and can be configured to generate SQL from natural language. "Unlike typical text-to-SQL systems that rely on pattern matching, Cortex Analyst uses a semantic model that maps business terms to underlying data," said Baris Gultekin, Snowflake's head of AI. "Customers can ask question in natural language and Cortex Analyst translates that into SQL and provides the response." Using Claude to aggregate and interpret results has enabled Snowflake to achieve 90% accuracy on text-to-SQL tasks, the company said. In a media briefing, executives praised Anthropic's commitment to safe and responsible AI deployment. Anthropic's model "simplifies the experience and completely aligns with the philosophy we have at Snowflake to help customers achieve what they want to do and not wrestle with infrastructure," Kleinerman said. Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger said his company's LLM is designed to respect the privacy of customer data. "We have no access to the data; the inference happens close to the data in a way that is very secure," he said. That message has resonated with enterprises, Krieger said. "Having a model that has the right safeguards in place, is hard to jailbreak and has been trained responsibly is actually a net plus that it is enhancing the trust at the deployment side." Snowflake also announced enhancements to Cortex Analyst, Search and Observability. A new advanced JOIN validation mitigates issues such as JOIN hallucinations and double-counting and enables Analyst to support multitable queries without compromising precision. A public preview of the new Snowsight web interface simplifies the process of building and refining semantic models. Administrators can select tables and columns and use LLMs running within Snowflake's secure perimeter to generate a starting semantic model file in YAML, a data serialization format used for configuration files and data exchange between programming languages. Cortex Search can now index tables with more than 100 million rows. Infrastructure optimizations have reduced serving costs by 30%. Users can now choose to perform multilingual searches using the snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0 or Voyage AI Innovation Inc.'s voyage-multilingual-2 vector embedding model. Enhancements to AI Observability evaluate the performance of Cortex Agents and applications using techniques such as LLM-as-a-judge, in which LLMs evaluate decisions or outputs independently or as an aid to human decision-making. AI Observability can also now report metrics such as relevance, "groundedness" and harmfulness to help in refining and improving agent performance. Users can compare evaluation runs side-by-side and assess the quality and accuracy of responses across different LLM configurations. Traces can log every step of agent executions across input prompts, tool use and final response generation.

Snowflake's New Cortex Agents Bridge AI and Enterprise Data Like Never Before

The Cortex Agents framework integrates Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet to enhance reasoning, coding, and workflow execution. Snowflake has launched Cortex Agents, a fully managed service aimed at integrating, retrieving, and processing structured and unstructured data at scale. Cortex Agents plan tasks, execute them using tools, and refine responses for improved accuracy. Available via a REST API, the service integrates into applications using Cortex Analyst for structured data (SQL generation) and Cortex Search for unstructured data retrieval. The new solution, now in public preview, enables businesses to build AI-driven applications with advanced governance and security features. The Cortex Agents framework integrates Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which enhances reasoning, coding, and workflow execution within Snowflake's secure perimeter. Cortex Agents review user queries and break them into structured and unstructured components. For example, a business user can request top distributors by revenue (structured) and then ask about contract details (unstructured). The agent disambiguates queries, splits tasks, and selects tools for execution. Cortex Analyst, a fully managed LLM-powered Snowflake Cortex feature, generates SQL for structured data, while Cortex Search retrieves insights from text, audio, and images. The system ensures governed access and compliance while mapping business terms to structured data using semantic understanding. Snowflake reports that Cortex Analyst has achieved 90% accuracy in text-to-SQL use cases. On the other hand, Cortex Search has outperformed OpenAI's embedding models by 12% in unstructured data retrieval accuracy. It supports large-scale indexing, improved affordability, and customisable vector embeddings. Snowflake also introduced Cortex AI Observability, powered by TruLens, for the evaluation and tracing of AI agents. "AI observability can evaluate agent performance using techniques such as LLM-as-a-judge, allowing customers to refine and optimise their applications," Snowflake said. Snowflake sees AI agents as a transformative force for enterprises, automating complex tasks and improving efficiency across industries such as finance, engineering, and customer support. "As LLMs continue to advance, agents will collaborate, plan, execute, and refine tasks, driving efficiency and reducing costs," the company said.

Snowflake expands AI tools with Anthropic partnership -- what it means for businesses

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Snowflake and Anthropic unveiled a major partnership today to embed AI agents directly into corporate data environments, empowering businesses to analyze vast amounts of information while maintaining strict security controls. The companies will integrate Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet model into Snowflake's new Cortex Agents platform, allowing organizations to deploy AI systems that can analyze both structured database information and unstructured content like documents within their existing security frameworks. "We believe that AI agents will soon be essential to the enterprise workforce," said Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, during a media roundtable. "They'll enhance the productivity for many teams such as customer support analytics, engineering, and they'll free up employee time to focus on higher value things." Snowflake strengthens AI capabilities with Anthropic's Claude 3.5 The partnership addresses a crucial challenge in enterprise AI adoption -- deploying powerful AI models securely at scale. Claude will run entirely within Snowflake's security boundary, eliminating concerns about sending sensitive data to external AI services. "Running Claude within Snowflake's security perimeter allows customers to build and deploy AI applications while keeping their data governed," said Mike Krieger, Anthropic's Chief Product Officer, during the press conference. Early results show promise. Snowflake reports 90% accuracy on complex text-to-SQL tasks in internal benchmarks, significantly outperforming previous approaches. Siemens Energy has already built an AI chatbot analyzing over half a million pages of internal documents, while Nissan North America achieved 97% accuracy in analyzing customer sentiment about dealer experiences. How Snowflake is using AI to automate business data analysis Cortex Agents, the platform at the heart of the announcement, orchestrates complex data tasks across both structured databases and unstructured content. The system combines two key components: Cortex Analyst, which converts natural language into accurate database queries, and Cortex Search, a hybrid search system that Snowflake claims outperforms competitors by at least 11% on standard benchmarks. "Having such a state of the art model available to Snowflake customers contributes to the ease of use experience," said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake. "Instead of which model to use, and how many prompts I need to go push to get something to behave the way I want it, or answer the question I need... it is phenomenal." Snowflake's Cortex Agents promise smarter, faster enterprise AI The partnership signals a shift in enterprise AI strategy. Companies now seek to integrate AI directly into existing data infrastructure rather than treating it as separate technology. "Nobody is looking for just a token vendor that exchanges input tokens for output tokens," Krieger explained. "They're looking for somebody who will help them craft their AI strategy do so in a way that's aligned with their values, and also that they trust to remain on the frontier." The platform includes comprehensive monitoring capabilities and maintains existing access controls and compliance requirements -- crucial features as AI regulation evolves. "Some amount of regulatory clarity would be helpful," noted Kleinerman during the announcement. "But I think it's on all of us, especially research labs that understand in next level detail that we're involved to help inform how that regulation is formed." Why Snowflake's AI strategy focuses on security and governance The partnership offers technical decision makers a potential path to deploy AI at scale while maintaining security and governance. Success will likely depend on careful implementation and clear use cases that deliver measurable business value. For enterprises grappling with growing data volumes and complexity, the ability to deploy AI safely and effectively could become a crucial competitive advantage. The platform's combination of advanced AI capabilities with robust security controls suggests a future where intelligent agents become an integral part of corporate operations.

Snowflake announces preview of Cortex Agent APIs to power enterprise data intelligence

Anthropic partnership could be "the jewel of this release" says analyst. Snowflake on Wednesday announced the public preview of Cortex Agents, a set of APIs built on top of the Snowflake Intelligence platform, a low-code offering that was first launched in November at Build, the company's annual developer conference. Asked at a press and analyst briefing held earlier this week how the most recent launch differs from what was introduced at Build, Baris Gultekin, head of AI at Snowflake, responded, "it is not a repeat" and that the agents are what Software Intelligence, which will be in private preview soon, builds on. Cortex Agents, he said, "plan and orchestrate tasks, use tools such as Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search to execute them, reflect on the results, and improve responses. As part of the planning, they explore options, split into smaller tasks, and overall provide a very highly accurate scalable system."