Snowflake Cortex is a powerful platform that streamlines and accelerates enterprise access to AI capabilities. By understanding what Cortex is and how it works, you can more effectively determine how to integrate it into your organization.
From a high-level perspective, Snowflake Cortex is a native AI and machine learning suite built directly into the Snowflake platform. It enables users to leverage advanced AI models using their Snowflake data without moving the data or provisioning separate infrastructure. Launched in May 2024, Cortex has quickly expanded its capabilities, including the addition of AISQL and Snowflake Convert over the summer.
Cortex includes a range of pre-trained models that support text generation, summarization, sentiment analysis, chat-style interaction, and more. It also enables the development of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications, allowing teams to create AI copilots entirely within Snowflake. This means powerful AI applications can run securely without exporting data.
For organizations that prefer not to use Snowflake’s native large language models, Cortex also supports custom LLMs hosted within the Snowflake environment. In short, Cortex enables AI adoption without data movement, without separate model-hosting platforms, and with governance built into Snowflake’s security framework.
Who Benefits from Snowflake Cortex?
Different enterprise roles can take advantage of Cortex in distinct ways:
- Business analysts
Use Cortex Analyst to ask questions in plain English and generate visualizations without writing SQL. The platform automatically converts natural language into queries and presents the results. - Data scientists
Train, refine, and deploy models, and build AI/ML pipelines directly on enterprise data within Snowflake. - Data engineers
Integrate AI into data workflows and pipelines without relying on external services. - Application developers
Embed AI features into user-facing products and services using Snowflake’s native capabilities. - Enterprise leaders
Drive AI adoption, reduce implementation costs, and ensure responsible and governed AI usage across the organization.
How Snowflake Cortex Accelerates AI Initiatives
To answer the ultimate question, “how can my business use Snowflake Cortex to accelerate AI initiatives?”, it helps to look at the most common applications:
- Self-Service BI
Self-service business intelligence leverages Cortex Analyst to enable non-technical users to explore data using natural language. A semantic model maps business terms to database schemas, allowing Cortex Analyst to generate SQL behind the scenes. This delivers insights and visualizations without requiring SQL expertise and gives more team members access to actionable data. - Document Intelligence
Cortex can extract structured data such as tables and fields from unstructured documents like PDFs and invoices. This is powered by Arctic TILT (Text-Image-Layout Transformer), which transforms documents into structured outputs. Common applications include invoice processing and insurance claims. - Knowledge-Augmented Chat
Knowledge-augmented chat uses LLMs to deliver chatbot-style responses grounded in domain-specific documents. After ingesting relevant content, Cortex Search performs semantic retrieval to surface the right context. The LLM then generates accurate, relevant responses. This approach is ideal for HR policy assistance, legal document guidance, or customer support.
Snowflake Cortex is designed to help organizations adopt AI faster by eliminating common obstacles related to data access, infrastructure, and model deployment. By bringing compute, models, and governance to your data, rather than the other way around, Cortex enables teams to move from experimentation to impact more quickly.
If you’d like to explore how Snowflake Cortex can support your organization’s AI strategy, the 7Rivers team is ready to help. Contact us to get started today!
