It appears that following its Q4 earnings call, AI cloud and Cortex solution provider Snowflake is planning to deepen its relationship with Microsoft and OpenAI in an effort to provide further AI business value to its clients.
During the earnings call, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said:
When it comes to AI, last year was foundational for us. We introduced AI, which is now being used by customers to seamlessly build data agents for both structured and unstructured data with state-of-the-art retrieval using Cortex Search and Analyst. We are supporting a range of market-leading models, including Anthropic’s Claude, Meta Llama, and DeepSeek.
Following this market-wide success of supporting leading AI models from major vendors, the Snowflake CEO also touched on the ongoing expanded partnership with Microsoft “that brings OpenAI’s models into Cortex.”
“This makes us the only data platform to seamlessly host both Anthropic and OpenAI, world-leading models enabling our customers to build data agents while ensuring that their data remains secure in Snowflake,” remarked Ramaswamy.
Driving Agent AI Forward
Ramaswamy also noted how Snowflake recently introduced Cortex Agents, an “agent orchestration framework to enable seamless planning and execution of tasks across structured and unstructured data, all powered by leading models such as Anthropic’s Claude.”
These agent solutions, such as Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search, allow Snowflake customers to scale agentic AI solutions for specific use cases. By deepening its partnership with Microsoft, Snowflake is now making Cortex Agents available in Microsoft 365 CoPilot and Microsoft Teams, “bringing millions of users, seamless access to information, and accelerated productivity, all within the Microsoft platform,” Ramaswamy said.
Ramaswamy also added:
All of these innovations are focused on driving real value for our customers. – These in turn are the essential building block for a strong AI foundation. – As we head to the next inflection point with agents, we now have over 4,000 customers using our AI and ML technology on a weekly basis.
Ramaswamy explained that Snowflake already has a “broad and deep partnership with Microsoft at the level of data,” and it can debut AI products on leading platforms like CoPilot and Teams.
“So, I’m very happy with that partnership. We are increasingly going to market together in a number of situations,” Ramaswamy noted.
“I think that is all hugely positive,” expressed Ramaswamy, who also added that “the specifics of this partnership mean is that OpenAI models that effectively accessible within Snowflake security perimeter.”
According to Ramaswamy, this provides a “guarantee that we make to our customers that their data is fully under our control,” thanks to Snowflake security considerations.
Ramaswamy said:
That ability to have access to these world-class models to then build different kinds of chatbot, different kinds of agentic applications. And so, what this enables is for us and our customers is to be able to build world-class applications without having to have data go anywhere else without special licenses that are needed. It just means that like OpenAI models are available out of the box just like Anthropic models are available on AWS out of the box.
