What changed
Snowflake Inc. announced a new set of artificial intelligence capabilities during its Expedition 2026 virtual conference, designed to bring business context, governance, and autonomous development into a unified environment. The updates include a new Business Ontology framework, expanded agent governance through Cortex AI Gateway, and autonomous data engineering capabilities that allow AI agents to build, monitor, and troubleshoot data pipelines with less human intervention.
What this means in practice
The company is positioning itself to support a shift where more coders and engineers will use AI throughout the software development lifecycle, while other departments adopt agents for daily tasks. For instance, sales operations are creating agents that can analyze sales risks and prepare customer outreach without writing code. Snowflake’s Business Ontology framework helps standardize definitions across an organization, ensuring agents use consistent business knowledge. This is crucial for preventing incompatible answers to business-related questions, even when both agents have accurate data. Snowflake CoCo and CoWork agents use these approved concepts to ground their responses. The new feature is currently in private preview and will soon be available in public preview.
Limitations and availability
The Cortex AI Gateway, introduced in July 2026, has been expanded with capabilities like agent abuse detection, observability, and dynamic model routing. These updates align with treating agents similarly to employees in terms of autonomy and trust. The platform applies existing security mechanisms to agent-driven operations while adding monitoring and cost controls. Snowflake also announced the public preview of Cortex Training, allowing customers to tailor open-weight AI models with proprietary information. This service simplifies model training without requiring extensive GPU resources. Additionally, Snowflake expanded its partnership with Oracle Corp. to offer its platform as a first-party service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
