TLDR: Snowflake has made significant strides in the artificial intelligence landscape by introducing new AI agent products, including Cortex Agents, Snowflake Intelligence, and Data Science Agent. These offerings aim to simplify AI deployment with a ’10-minute build promise’ and empower business users with natural language querying capabilities. The move aligns with the growing industry focus on agentic AI, a key strategic technology trend for 2025, and is supported by the acquisition of Crunchy Data to bolster developer infrastructure.
Snowflake, a prominent data cloud company, is making a substantial commitment to artificial intelligence, particularly in the realm of AI agents, with a bold ’10-minute build promise’ for its new offerings. The company unveiled several key innovations at its annual Summit conference, including Cortex Agents, now in public preview, alongside Snowflake Intelligence and Data Science Agent. These developments position Snowflake at the forefront of the ‘agentic AI’ trend, which Gartner has identified as a top strategic technology trend for 2025.
Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, emphasized the transformative potential of these new tools. ‘AI agents are a major leap from traditional automation or chatbots,’ Gultekin stated, highlighting the need for an ‘AI-ready information ecosystem’ for scalable deployment. He further elaborated that this ecosystem requires businesses to ‘unite data silos, maintain enterprise-grade security and compliance, and have easy ways to adopt and build agents.’
One of the flagship products, Snowflake Intelligence, is designed to revolutionize business intelligence. It will allow business users to query enterprise data using natural language, eliminating the need for complex SQL queries or dashboards. This system is capable of processing both structured databases and unstructured documents, such as PowerPoints, PDFs, and spreadsheets, through what Snowflake terms ‘intelligent data agents.’ This innovation directly addresses a persistent challenge in the business intelligence market, which analysts project will reach an impressive $75.7 billion by 2033. McKinsey research indicates that 46% of business leaders identify workforce skill gaps as a significant barrier to AI adoption, a bottleneck Snowflake aims to alleviate with its user-friendly AI agents.
The Data Science Agent, also powered by Anthropic’s Claude, further expands Snowflake’s AI capabilities, providing advanced tools for data professionals. In a strategic move to bolster its developer infrastructure, Snowflake also announced the acquisition of Crunchy Data, a leading provider of enterprise-grade PostgreSQL solutions. This acquisition is expected to enable customers like Blue Yonder and LandingAI to deploy AI applications more efficiently within Snowflake’s ecosystem.
The broader industry context underscores the significance of agentic AI. McKinsey research illustrates the evolution, noting that while a 2023 AI bot might support call center representatives, a 2025 AI agent can converse with a customer, plan actions, process payments, check for fraud, and complete shipping actions. However, Deloitte predicts that while 25% of companies using generative AI will launch agentic AI pilots this year, many will face challenges with reliability requirements, emphasizing that ‘getting the job right most of the time isn’t enough’ for production enterprise deployment.
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Beyond product launches, Snowflake is also expanding its global footprint, particularly in India. The company views India as a ‘land of opportunities’ for data and AI, significantly increasing its investments and aiming to grow its headcount to over 700 employees by the end of 2025. Notably, 50% of Snowflake’s Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) partner ecosystem is rooted in India, reflecting a strategic commitment to the region’s burgeoning data and AI landscape.
