The importance of Snowflake Inc. in the enterprise AI ecosystem is not necessarily its contribution to the analytics warehouse. What will be more significant going forward is Snowflake’s role as an enabler of intelligent data apps.

Snowflake’s pivot to the world of intelligent data has been accompanied by a focus on building what theCUBE Research has described as a system of intelligence, a metric-tree control plane that can ingest and harmonize data with AI models. The company’s introduction of Cortex, a fully-managed AI service built natively on its platform, was a key step in maintaining Snowflake’s momentum.

“We believe Snowflake’s most consequential move is not gen AI per se; rather it is the quiet build-out of a metric store that could mature into the green-layer System of Intelligence,” said theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. “If Cortex agents can read/write against a harmonized metric tree, Snowflake could morph from analytic powerhouse to an operational nerve center, bridging systems of record across clouds.”

TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, will cover the latest news and announcements at Snowflake Summit in San Francisco, June 2-3. Tune in for on-site reporting and exclusive interviews as theCUBE’s analysts talk with industry leaders from Snowflake, its partners and customers. Coverage will explore the latest use cases and product announcements tied to Snowflake’s enterprise AI strategy during the event. (* Disclosure below.)

Agents for intelligent data

Cortex Code, the company’s coding agent designed for data-centric workflows on Snowflake, became generally available in February, and Cortex agents have received a number of enhancements over the past year.

Snowflake released updates to both Cortex Code and Snowflake Intelligence that, as the company noted, positioned the platform as a centralized control layer for the agentic enterprise. With Snowflake Intelligence, a context-aware AI agent for business users, the company is integrating its portfolio with business tools that can take action across enterprise workflows.

The company also introduced in research preview Project SnowWork, a platform designed to move AI beyond queries and into systems that can execute multi-step workflows while leveraging enterprise data. Snowflake is developing technology that can synthesize data, surface insights and recommend next steps.

“We’re beginning to think at a higher level of what the future of workflows should be,” Snowflake Chief Executive Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a briefing for the media last year. “Some moments are special and the time we are going through with AI feels like one of them. There is no AI strategy without a data strategy.”

Alliance with OpenAI

Snowflake has continued to define its own AI strategy in recent months with several key moves that will likely receive further attention at the upcoming Summit. Prominent among these is the firm’s $200 million multiyear partnership with OpenAI Group PBC to make OpenAI’s models natively available inside Snowflake’s Cortex AI managed service and Snowflake Intelligence.

The two companies will also co-develop new features using OpenAI’s application programming interfaces and agent frameworks, building interoperable AI agents that can reason over governed data and act across systems. OpenAI already relies on Snowflake as a data platform for experiment tracking and analytics, and Snowflake employs ChatGPT Enterprise internally for employee productivity and decision-making.

At the start of this year, Snowflake acquired Observe AI Inc., an observability platform that helps developers find the root cause of application slowdowns and track inference costs incurred by a large language model. In March, Snowflake announced the integration of Bedrock Data into its AI Data Cloud platform, providing users with petabyte-scale data discovery, classification and entitlements analysis for sensitive data used in AI systems.

These recent moves and the deployment of new products have strengthened Snowflake’s presence in the AI arena as it pivots from an analytics warehouse to enabler of intelligent data apps.

“The market’s initial impression was Snowflake got caught flat-footed by the AI awakening,” according to theCUBE Research’s Vellante and Gilbert. “But good AI starts with quality, clean, governed, trusted data and Snowflake customers have plenty of that. As such, with focus and engineering talent, Snowflake has catapulted itself to a leading position in the AI race.”

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit, June 2-3. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s exclusive content on-demand after the event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE podcasts

SiliconANGLE’s “theCUBE Pod” is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, which you can enjoy while on the go. During each podcast, SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante unpack the biggest trends in enterprise tech — from AI and cloud to regulation and workplace culture — with exclusive context and analysis.

SiliconANGLE also produces our weekly “Breaking Analysis” program, where Dave Vellante examines the top stories in enterprise tech, combining insights from theCUBE with spending data from Enterprise Technology Research, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.

Guests

During theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit, don’t miss insights from company executives and industry experts who will explore the latest use cases and product announcements tied to Snowflake’s enterprise AI strategy. Tune in for exclusive insights and analysis as theCUBE examines how Snowflake is building its AI platform.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Snowflake Summit event. Neither Snowflake, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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