Snowflake Unveils Business Ontology and Cortex AI Gateway for Agents

Shared context and central controls

Business Ontology sits within the Horizon Context capabilities of Snowflake Horizon Catalog. It lets organizations define core business concepts once, such as "net revenue", assign an owner to each definition and link it to the relevant data. According to Snowflake, it works with Semantic Views and Cortex Sense to provide a common context that AI agents, applications and employees can all use.

Cortex AI Gateway aims to unify the controls applied to the models, tools and operations that agents use, covering security, governance and cost management. Snowflake says agents connect to models, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and enterprise systems, which creates a need for consolidated management instead of handling each connection and control separately.

Agents that work in the background

The new capabilities in Snowflake CoCo, the coding agent for data teams, and Snowflake CoWork, the agent for knowledge workers, target repetitive tasks. They run in the background according to the business context, permissions and controls that have been set, and go back to employees when a decision or approval is needed.

Snowflake said Docusign, Pacific Life Insurance Company, Shelter Mutual Insurance Company, Telenav and United Rentals already use context-backed AI agents on its platform.

The company cautioned that the announcements include products at different availability stages, from general availability to public and private previews. That means not every feature will reach all customers at the same time.