Snowflake retooled its data cloud platform through a sweeping set of product updates targeting enterprise agentic AI adoption, the company said Tuesday during its annual Snowflake Summit event. The series of announcements came on the heels of Snowflake’s Monday agreement to purchase PostgreSQL startup Crunchy Data.
The AI data cloud company rolled out a hybrid multicloud data ingestion service called Snowflake Openflow, the Cortex Knowledge Extensions third-party data mining pipeline and AI-powered natural-language analytics and data science assistants under the Snowflake Intelligence and Data Science Agent rubrics.
Snowflake also trumpeted the general availability of its Cortex AISQL agentic querying tool and the SnowConvert AI data modernization copilot designed to help enterprises migrate from legacy warehouses.
“We are making it easy to tap into structured data. We are making it easy to tap into unstructured data as well. And we're helping our customers build a strong foundation to lead in the era of agentic AI,” CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said last month during the company’s Q1 earnings call for the 2026 fiscal year.
As enterprises seek business value from generative AI-powered agentic automation, major vendors are racing to deploy the data integrations, modernization tools and pipelines organizations need to fuel the technology.
The Crunchy Data acquisition brought AI compliance and scaling capabilities in-house for Snowflake, less than a month after Databricks, a competitor in the AI data cloud space, announced its intent to purchase PostgreSQL startup Neon.
“We’re doubling down on the momentum behind Postgres and investing in its future while preserving the openness, the extensibility and developer-first ethos that make it great,” Ramaswamy said during a Monday keynote.
As part of its integration strategy, Snowflake connected its data cloud to The Associated Press, USA Today and several other publishers through Cortex Knowledge Extensions that let enterprises feed news and other timely data to AI apps and agents, the company said in a Tuesday announcement. The pipeline creates a marketplace for enterprises to source third-party data while ensuring publishers are compensated.
Snowflake Intelligence unifies raw and structured data from spreadsheets, documents, images and databases, using Anthropic and OpenAI large language models.
The integration connects the company’s data cloud to Google Drive, Salesforce Data Cloud via Zero Copy, Workday and other enterprise vendor platforms, aligning security controls, data masking and governance policies. It will be in public preview soon, the company said.
“There's so much that we take for granted about how things used to work that just aren't true anymore,” Ramaswamy said, pointing to the impact of AI on the enterprise in a keynote conversation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“We’ll be at a point next year where you can not only use a system to automate business processes or build these new products and services, but you can really say, ‘I have this hugely important problem in my business, I will throw a ton of compute at it'… and the models will be able to go figure out things that teams of people on their own can’t do,” Altman said.
