Snowflake Summit Day 1: Solving Agent Governance with Natoma

Snowflake is making it easier for companies to safely manage their data and actions AI agents take across business workflows. 

More than nine out of 10 organisations (96%) face significant challenges with scaling AI across the enterprise, according to Snowflake’s The ROI of Gen AI and Agents research. 

Snowflake aims to combat this through its acquisition of Natoma, an enterprise Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform for AI agents. 

“The future of AI is about turning fragmented systems into actionable insight,” said Sridhar Rawmaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, in the keynote for Snowflake Summit 26, taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, on 1-4 June.

“Intelligence without governance creates risk,” Sridhar added.

“Agents don’t just need access to data. They need the right context, permissions and policy guardrails to operate safely inside the enterprise.”

With this acquisition, Snowflake customers will be able to securely connect Cortex Agents, Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Code and other AI platforms to enterprise systems across SaaS applications, cloud environments, VPCs and on-prem infrastructure through a verified library of MCP servers. 

Natoma provides the control and governance fabric for these connections, helping enterprises manage how AI agents discover, access and act across systems – with trust, visibility, identity-aware authorisation, policies and complete auditability built in.

This means that data held in Snowflake can be correlated with contextual information from Slack, email, CRM, Jira, internal APIs, databases an applications so that Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code can deliver more relevant, actionable outcomes. 

“Agents behave differently than human users. They can explore paths, call APIs and attempt workflows in ways that require clear boundaries and oversight,” explains Mayank Upadhyay, Chief Security and Trust Officer, and VP of Engineering, at Snowflake.

“Enterprises need a way to give their people the magic of agentic productivity while maintaining a single point of control over what those agents can access and do. That’s why we announced our intent to acquire Natoma.”

The power of out-of-the-box connectivity

The acquisition aims to radically simplify how companies deploy advanced workflows by bridging the gap between AI intelligence and enterprise security.

“It’s amazing,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake, who spoke with Technology Magazine at the Summit. “It [the acquisition] lets agents connect with business systems, more than a hundred systems out of the box.

“It lets administrators configure policy on what they can and cannot do and lets them see the activity. I’m very excited.”

Seamless security as a business enabler

Ultimately, the goal is for complex backend governance to feel effortless for the end-user, transforming security teams from gatekeepers into innovation accelerators.

“The end state, once Natoma is fully integrated, should feel invisible to the user,” says Mayank.

“An admin flips a switch, and their people don’t have to do anything differently. They simply notice that the AI tools they’re already using can suddenly access far more information on their behalf, all within a governed environment. The security team isn’t blocking access; they’re enabling it.

“That’s security becoming an enabler, rather than a blocker. That’s the standard we’re building toward, and Natoma is the next major step.”

Proven internal success

Snowflake has already deployed Natoma across its own organisation and the results have been immediate, according to Mayank.

“It summarises my unread emails, searches across Slack and Google Drive when I can’t remember where something was shared and surfaces what I need without context-switching across five different tools,” he says.

Building the future Layer of AI Governance

Natoma’s team brings deep expertise in MCPs, gateway infrastructure, identity governance and privileged access management, as well as experience in building enterprise security products.

This specialised skill set allows Snowflake to accelerate its roadmap for secure agentic AI, helping enterprises to scale their automation efforts without risking data leaks or compliance breaches.

“AI agents will only become enterprise-ready if organisations can govern how they operate across systems, applications and tools,” says Pratyus Patnaik, Co-Founder and CEO of Natoma.

“Together with Snowflake, we’re building the governance and connectivity layer that enables enterprises to securely operationalise AI at scale.”

Natoma’s capabilities will be integrated into Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud and available to customers soon.