Snowflake expands AI Data Cloud portfolio

Enterprise AI company Snowflake has announced new additions to its AI Data Cloud portfolio, including a new platform designed to enable enterprises to ask business questions across their enterprise data. Soon to launch in private preview, Snowflake Intelligence can also allow business users to create data agents for analysing, summarising and taking action from enterprise data.

The platform is designed to protect customer IP and deliver answers backed by trusted enterprise data. It can connect with third-party tools to support functionality such as analysing sales transactions in a database. Other third party integrations include knowledge bases such as Microsoft’s SharePoint, and productivity tools such as Slack and Salesforce.

Enterprise users can define the datasets they want to ask questions to, and can use APIs or write to Snowflake tables to record business decisions made using the data.

Snowflake Head of AI Baris Gultekin said Snowflake Intelligence can empower teams to talk to their enterprise data using natural language.

“Snowflake Intelligence represents the next step in Snowflake’s AI journey, further enabling teams to easily, and safely, advance their businesses with data-driven insights they can act on to deliver measurable impact,” he said.

Snowflake has also unveiled a unified platform for compiling and storing transactional and analytical data. The platform, Unistore, is powered by Hybrid Tables, which is said to enable fast, high-concurrency point operations to support transactional workloads.

Unistore promises to help organisations overcome limitations with traditional data architectures such as the need to manage separate transactional and analytical databases, as well as the slow and complex process of transferring data between these databases.

The platform brings together ready-to-query transactional and analytical data in a single platform, and the company said it is capable of running double-digit millisecond point operations alongside users’ analytical queries.

Snowflake said this will enable organisations to unlock use cases including the ability to maintain application and workflow state in real time, serving low-latency data for apps without the need to move between databases, and building lightweight transactional apps using simplified app development processes and architectures.

“Snowflake has been at the forefront of data innovation for over a decade now, and continues to find new ways to streamline organisations’ data foundations. The general availability of Hybrid Tables is the next iteration of Snowflake’s journey, empowering enterprises to execute both transactional and analytics use cases from a single platform,” said Snowflake Head of Core Services Carl Perry. “With Hybrid Tables, which power Unistore, enterprises also benefit from Snowflake’s unified security and governance across all of their data, so they can spend less time worrying about their data protections, and more time accelerating innovation with the AI Data Cloud.”

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