Snowflake unveils Cortex Agents for data integration ease

Snowflake has introduced Cortex Agents, a managed service designed to simplify the integration, retrieval, and processing of both structured and unstructured data for enterprise use.

Cortex Agents work by leveraging Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet, providing agentic text-to-SQL capabilities to enhance structured data retrieval.

Alongside this development, improvements have been made to Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search, the foundational tools behind the Cortex Agents.

Cortex Analyst, now generally available, employs Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet as its main large language model (LLM) to facilitate high-quality data retrieval. Cortex Search has also been enhanced to deliver superior retrieval accuracy, surpassing other enterprise search systems by 12% on various benchmarks when using OpenAI embedding models.

AI agents represent a forward-looking solution for enterprises, though companies often encounter difficulties scaling them in terms of ensuring trust, security, and proper data access governance. Cortex Agents, built on Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search, enable companies to develop functional agents capable of use in scenarios such as claims processing, customer support, and retail order management.

"At Snowflake, we believe that AI agents will soon be essential to the enterprise workforce."

"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," said Baris Gultekin, Head of AI, Snowflake. "Data agents, which is a specialised category of AI agents, will combine data and tools to deliver accurate grounded insights by effectively selecting the right data sources."

Gultekin's sentiments are echoed by Glenn Walker, Chief Data Officer at Luminate Data. "At Luminate, we're revolutionising how we deliver precise, data-driven insights to our clients through generative AI applications. Snowflake's unified data and AI platform provides our developer team with scalable processing and retrieval for both structured and unstructured data — the critical building blocks for developing, deploying, and orchestrating data agents powering our application," Walker stated. "Using Snowflake Cortex AI brings advanced AI within the same security and governance perimeter as our data and saves us countless development hours, allowing us to unlock the full potential of entertainment industry data with agentic AI."

Cortex Agents facilitate the orchestration of tasks across various data types, including Snowflake tables and PDFs in object storage, thereby offering precise answers to complex queries. This is accomplished through Cortex Search, Cortex Analyst, and LLMs that ensure efficiency and governance throughout the process.

The system enables AI agents to plan tasks, use tools to execute them, and reflect on the outcomes to improve responses. As a REST API, Cortex Agents can integrate seamlessly into any application, employing Cortex Analyst for structured SQL and Cortex Search for unstructured data analysis.

The Cortex Agents workflow involves several steps, starting with planning, where queries from both structured and unstructured sources are processed. Exploration allows agents to refine ambiguous questions by considering multiple possibilities, thereby enhancing accuracy.

Cortex Agents also break down tasks into subtasks, facilitating more precise responses. Tools such as Cortex Analyst or Cortex Search are chosen to ensure compliance and access governed data, based on the task requirements.

Post-tool use, agents reflect on the results, asking for further clarification or iterating if necessary. This level of orchestration assists in handling complex data queries while maintaining strict compliance controls within Snowflake's secure environment.

Upon deployment, performance metrics and behaviour can be continually monitored and refined, enabling enterprises to scale AI agents responsibly, maintaining security and compliance throughout.

Combined with Snowflake's other offerings, Cortex Agents represent a comprehensive solution for managing both types of data at scale.