At this year’s annual conference BUILD conference, data architecture giant Snowflake pulled out all the stops to offer its customers advanced capabilities, including some long-prereleased features, to easily mobilize their data sets to build and share powerful applications of AI.

The company has launched new tools for Cortex AI, its fully managed offering for developing conversational AI applications based on enterprise data hosted on its platform.

It also announced Snowflake Intelligence, allowing users to create “data agents” that can not only answer questions related to structured (organized in tables) and unstructured (PDFs, documents, etc.) data on the platform, but also to act with third parties. platforms like Salesforce and Google Workspace using the generated responses.

Below is an overview of all the major announcements:

Cortex AI Improvements

Since his introduction last yearCortex AI receives regular updates from Snowflake to simplify how developers build and run AI applications.

At BUILD, Snowflake has continued to strengthen this offering with new support for multimodal input for applications in development, managed connectors for integrating internal knowledge bases into applications, and knowledge extensions for linking third-party documents, such as press articles, services.

The company also announced the Cortex Chat API combining structured and unstructured data into a single REST API call for accelerated development of RAG and agentic applications; observability of developed AI applications (building on the acquisition of TruEra); and support for SQL joins and multi-round conversations in Cortex Analyst to unlock richer insights from structured data.

Snowflake Intelligence

With enhancements to Cortex AI, including integration with internal knowledge bases, the company announced Snowflake Intelligencea unified platform that enterprise users can use to create “data agents.” T

Agents will use business intelligence data hosted by Snowflake as well as that connected via third-party platforms to provide users with instant answers to their business questions.

Additionally, once the information is produced, users can request the same agent to act on it through integrated third-party tools.

This can involve a wide range of tasks in third-party applications, from automatically and autonomously creating an editable form in Google Workspace using the generated information to editing an entry in Salesforce CRM.

Open catalog, Document AI improvements

Last June, during its flagship summit, Snowflake and its industrial partners revealed Polaris as a vendor-independent catalog implementation for indexing and organizing data according to the Apache Iceberg table format.

The offer has since been open source and donated to the Apache Foundation. At BUILD, the company went a step ahead and launched a hosted, fully managed version of the catalog called Snowflake Open Catalog. T

Now available to everyone, Polaris helps businesses grow and scale by integrating new engines and applying consistent governance controls.

Additionally, Snowflake also announced the general availability of Document AIthe product it offers to allow users to extract data from unstructured documents like invoices, on AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Threat prevention and security monitoring

In light of recent customer data breachSnowflake has taken several steps to strengthen the security of its users, including enforcing multi-factor authentication by default.

At BUILD, the company continued this work with the introduction of Password Leak Protection, a feature that will automatically detect and notify customers if their Snowflake credentials have been exposed on the dark web (a bit like Google).

According to Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake, the company might even disable accounts with compromised credentials to protect the accounts.

On top of that, Snowflake announced a new Threat Intelligence Scanner package for its Trust Center, the place where users see how well their accounts are configured.

The feature will provide users with a view of at-risk users, giving them the ability to detect when a potentially at-risk user is active as well as the best steps to handle the situation.

Snowflake’s Trust Center also benefits from extensibility, which will allow third-party partners to leverage Snowflake’s native application framework and add additional controls and assessments to the dashboard.

Snowflake BUILD takes place from November 12 to November 15, 2024.