Snowflake Inc. announced a significant expansion of its Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code offerings on April 21, 2026, marking a strategic shift toward enabling what the company calls the agentic enterprise. The updates are designed to allow organizations to integrate disparate data sources, enterprise systems, and diverse artificial intelligence models directly within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. By providing a unified control plane, Snowflake aims to facilitate the deployment of autonomous AI agents capable of executing complex business processes across various platforms.
The expansion of Snowflake Intelligence introduces new native connectors for major enterprise applications, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SAP. These connectors enable AI agents to retrieve and process live data from external systems while maintaining the security and governance protocols of the Snowflake environment. According to the company, this integration reduces the need for complex data pipelines and ensures that AI models have access to the most current operational data. The platform now includes enhanced reasoning capabilities, allowing agents to decompose high-level business objectives into actionable steps.
Simultaneously, Snowflake unveiled updates to Cortex Code, its specialized suite for AI-assisted development. The new features include advanced large language models optimized for generating and optimizing SQL and Python code. These models are integrated with Snowflake’s metadata layer, providing them with deep context regarding an organization’s specific data structures. This context-aware approach is intended to improve the accuracy of code generation and reduce the time required for developers to build and deploy data-intensive applications.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, Chief Executive Officer of Snowflake, emphasized the importance of governance in the transition to agentic workflows. He stated that for AI agents to be effective, they must operate within a trusted environment where data privacy and access controls are strictly enforced. To support this, Snowflake has integrated these new capabilities with Snowflake Horizon, its built-in governance and discovery solution. This ensures that every action taken by an AI agent is logged, auditable, and compliant with corporate policies.
The company also reported that the new updates include performance enhancements for Snowflake Cortex, with internal benchmarks showing a 25 percent improvement in inference speed for agentic tasks compared to previous versions. These technical advancements are part of Snowflake's broader strategy to capture a larger share of the enterprise AI market by providing the infrastructure necessary for autonomous operations. The updates are available immediately to Snowflake customers across all supported cloud regions, reinforcing the company's commitment to a multi-cloud strategy.