Snowflake Cortex AI

What it does

Cortex AI is Snowflake’s AI layer. With SQL functions such as AI_COMPLETE, AI_CLASSIFY, AI_EXTRACT, AI_SUMMARIZE or AI_TRANSCRIBE you analyse text, images, documents and audio right next to your tables. Cortex Analyst turns plain-language questions into SQL queries; Cortex Search and Cortex Agents combine structured and unstructured data. You can choose models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Mistral AI, DeepSeek and xAI and adapt your own variants through fine-tuning.

Who it suits

Companies whose data already lives in Snowflake and who want to apply AI to it without copying it into another system – for example data teams sorting customer feedback or analysing contracts. Without a Snowflake account, getting started is hardly worth it.

Data protection for businesses

You pick the cloud and region when creating the account, including Europe, such as Frankfurt. Snowflake does not use inputs and outputs to train models for other customers, with no setting required. Note: since March 2026, new accounts allow requests to be processed in any region by default. With the CORTEX_ENABLED_CROSS_REGION parameter set to AWS_EU or AZURE_EU you restrict this to Europe; some newer models are then unavailable. Snowflake provides a data processing agreement. For regulated industries there is the Business Critical edition.

Limits

Costs depend on consumption and are hard to estimate in advance. In trial accounts, AI features only work after you add a credit card. Not every model is available in every region.