Snowflake Cortex

About Snowflake Cortex

Snowflake Cortex is a suite of AI and machine learning services fully integrated into the Snowflake Data Cloud, enabling organizations to leverage the power of large language models, ML functions, and AI-driven analytics directly on their governed data. By bringing AI to the data rather than moving data to AI, Cortex eliminates data movement risks and simplifies the path from data to intelligence. Cortex LLM Functions provide access to industry-leading large language models including those from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and Google directly through SQL commands. Users can perform text summarization, sentiment analysis, translation, and question answering without any ML infrastructure management. The serverless architecture means organizations pay only for the compute they use, with no GPUs to provision or models to deploy. Cortex Analyst is a conversational AI interface that enables business users to ask questions about their structured data in natural language and receive accurate SQL-generated answers. It uses semantic models to understand business context and ensure query accuracy, bridging the gap between business questions and technical data access. This democratizes data analysis across the organization without requiring SQL expertise. Cortex Search provides a fully managed search service for unstructured data stored in Snowflake, enabling hybrid search capabilities that combine semantic understanding with keyword matching. Organizations can build RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) applications that ground AI responses in their proprietary data, reducing hallucinations and ensuring accuracy in AI-generated outputs. Snowflake Cortex inherits Snowflake's enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance framework. All AI processing occurs within Snowflake's secure perimeter, and data never leaves the customer's account for model inference. This architecture is particularly valuable for organizations in regulated industries that need AI capabilities but cannot expose sensitive data to external services. The platform supports deployment across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud with data residency options in major regions worldwide.