Snowflake has unveiled a sweep of new AI capabilities designed to move businesses past AI experiments and into deploying agents across day-to-day operations — the centerpiece announcements of Snowflake Summit 2026.
The headline product is Snowflake CoWork, the company’s personal agent for knowledge workers, expanded from the former Snowflake Intelligence. Rather than a chat interface bolted onto a dashboard, CoWork is positioned as a working partner that queries, analyzes, and acts on enterprise data on the user’s behalf.
Underpinning the agents is Cortex Sense, a shared context layer that automatically equips agents with business definitions, operational knowledge, and enterprise data. Combined with plugins bundling skills, business logic, and MCP connectors, Snowflake says enterprises can stand up production-ready agents grounded in their operational reality from day one — not after months of bespoke integration.
The agentic push extends across the stack: CoCo (Cortex Code) serves as a Snowflake-native AI coding agent; Openflow orchestrates data and AI pipelines; Adaptive Compute automatically tunes for cost and performance; Cortex AISQL brings AI-powered enhancements to querying; and a new agentic section of the Snowflake Marketplace offers ready-to-deploy agents and tools.
“Day-to-day work is about partnering with and guiding intelligent agents, and soon they will be operating across your business continuously, autonomously,” the company said of the shift it calls the era of the agentic enterprise.
The strategy is clear: Snowflake is racing Databricks, Microsoft, and Google to own the agentic control plane — betting that the platform holding an enterprise’s governed data is best placed to run its agents too. The announcements carry particular weight in the Gulf, where AI adoption among enterprises is among the fastest globally.
