Snowflake unveiled a Business Ontology framework, an extension of its existing semantic views that lets organizations set approved definitions for business terms. Its coding agent for data teams, Snowflake CoCo, and its personal work agent, Snowflake CoWork, use these concepts to ground their responses. The Business Ontology feature is in private preview and is headed to public preview soon.
Cortex AI Gateway, which Snowflake introduced in July 2026, is positioned as a single front door for agents inside an organization. The expanded version adds agent abuse detection, observability and tracing, Cortex sandboxes, AI cost governance, dynamic model routing and tool integration using technology from the Natoma acquisition. Existing controls such as data masking and access restrictions apply to agent-driven operations.
Snowflake also put Cortex Training into public preview, letting customers tailor open-weight models with their own proprietary information without managing the underlying infrastructure. Separately, the company announced an expanded partnership with Oracle to offer its platform as a first-party service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Why it matters if you build agents
Developers building agents on Snowflake can use shared business definitions so that multiple agents answer the same question consistently, though the feature is not yet generally available.
Agent-level cost controls, model routing, tool access restrictions and activity records are now part of the same gateway, which may simplify governance for enterprise deployments.
Cortex Training is aimed at teams that want smaller specialized models instead of relying only on large hosted models.
Get stories like this every weekday
One short email with the day's agent tooling news.