Snowflake Bets Big on Agentic AI With Launches at Summit 25
Snowflake has unveiled two new AI agent products this week at its annual Summit conference in San Francisco, marking the data cloud company’s most direct challenge yet to traditional business intelligence vendors.
The announcements – Snowflake Intelligence and Data Science Agent – arrive as enterprise software companies scramble to capitalise on what Gartner has named its top strategic technology trend for 2025: agentic AI.
“AI agents are a major leap from traditional automation or chatbots, but in order to deploy them at scale, businesses need an AI-ready information ecosystem,” Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, says. “This means enterprises must be able to unite data silos, maintain enterprise-grade security and compliance, and have easy ways to adopt and build agents.”
Targeting the $75bn BI question
Snowflake Intelligence, which the company said will enter public preview soon, allows business users to query enterprise data using natural language rather than SQL or complex dashboards. The system processes both structured databases and unstructured documents – PowerPoints, PDFs, spreadsheets – through what the company calls “intelligent data agents.”
The product targets a persistent problem in the business intelligence market, which analysts project will reach $75.7 billion by 2033, according to Dimension Market Research. Despite decades of BI tool evolution, many business users still cannot extract insights from their own data without technical assistance.
McKinsey research shows that 46% of business leaders identify workforce skill gaps as a significant barrier to AI adoption. The result is a bottleneck that has survived multiple waves of self-service analytics promises.
“At WHOOP, our mission is to unlock human performance and healthspan, and data is central to everything we do,” said Matt Luizzi, Senior Director of Business Analytics at the fitness technology company. “Snowflake Intelligence marks a big step forward in our ability to be a data-first organisation, ensuring that all employees can access insights without relying on analytics teams as the intermediary.”
WHOOP is among the more than 5,200 customers Snowflake reports are already using its Cortex AI platform, alongside companies like BlackRock, Luminate and Penske Logistics.
The agentic AI evolution
The distinction between current AI assistants and true agents matters for understanding why multiple vendors are converging on this technology now. McKinsey research illustrates the evolution: “In 2023, an AI bot could support call center representatives by synthesizing data to suggest responses. In 2025, an AI agent can converse with a customer and plan the actions it will take afterward – processing a payment, checking for fraud and completing a shipping action.”
Yet Deloitte predicts that while 25% of companies using generative AI will launch agentic AI pilots this year, many will struggle with reliability requirements. As the firm’s research notes: “Getting the job right most of the time isn’t enough” for production enterprise deployment.
Another announcement from Snowflake, Data Science Agent, targets these reliability concerns by focusing on structured machine learning workflows. The tool, powered by Anthropic’s Claude model, automates routine ML model development tasks like data preparation, feature engineering and training.
“By integrating Claude’s reasoning capabilities directly into Snowflake’s platform, we’re further eliminating the traditional barriers between data and insights,” said Michael Gerstenhaber, VP of Product Management at Anthropic. “Business users can now have natural conversations with their enterprise data, while data scientists can automate complex ML workflows – all through simple natural language interactions.”
Snowflake doubles down on developer infrastructure with Crunchy Data acquisition
Alongside its agentic AI announcements, Snowflake revealed plans to acquire Crunchy Data, a leading provider of enterprise-grade PostgreSQL solutions, targeting the 49% of developers who use PostgreSQL according to industry surveys.
Crunchy Data brings proven experience in regulated environments, including FedRAMP compliance for federal agencies and Fortune 500 financial institutions. The technology will enable customers like Blue Yonder and LandingAI to deploy AI applications more efficiently within Snowflake's ecosystem.
“We built Crunchy Data with the vision to become a Postgres solution of choice for leading enterprise organisations,” said Paul Laurence, Co-Founder at Crunchy Data. “We’re excited to join forces with Snowflake to provide their customers who already rely on Postgres the ability to run mission-critical regulated workloads with increased confidence and security on the Snowflake platform.”
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