Snowflake Enhances AI Capabilities at the 2026 Summit
Snowflake has introduced multiple innovations for its platform, particularly related to the use of artificial intelligence. Cortex Code has become CoCo, Intelligence has become CoWork, Horizon Catalog unifies governance, security, and business context, and there are also new features regarding interoperability with support for Apache Iceberg v3.
Snowflake's AI Renewed at the Snowflake Summit 26
Snowflake has focused heavily on AI functionalities related to its platform and is continuing to expand and renew them over time. The company began by announcing name changes: Cortex Code is now CoCo, while Intelligence has become CoWork.
CoCo is now available on desktop, mobile, Slack, VS Code, Claude Code, and Microsoft Excel, allowing developers to significantly expand the number of tools at their disposal. There are also additional integrations thanks to a constantly active AI agent residing on the local machine, along with an MCP server and additional plugins.
Snowflake CoWork is a personal AI agent that allows users to query data from the Snowflake platform without the need to instruct it on their format and enables multiple actions, such as sending emails or messages on Slack, directly from the Snowflake interface, thus not interrupting the workflow.
Lastly, Horizon Context allows for collecting data from different systems to provide the AI with full situational context, both within and outside of the Snowflake platform. Horizon Context enables integration of data from PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Tableau, Power BI, and dbt, and supplies data to CoCo so that searches can centralize data access in one location.
Interestingly, Snowflake also introduced Datastream, a data streaming service compatible with Apache Kafka that competes directly with Confluent, and which Snowflake offers as a tool for providing real-time data to AIs.
On the interoperability front, support for Apache Iceberg v3 has arrived, alongside Snowflake Storage for Apache Iceberg Tables, management of access to external storage engines, and support for Iceberg Scan Plan REST APIs.
"The future of AI in the enterprise will depend on organizations’ ability to effectively connect intelligence, reliable data, and concrete action throughout the company," says Marika Lilla, Country Manager of Snowflake. "With the announcements from the Snowflake Summit 26, we present innovations that fuel the agentic enterprise, providing organizations with a reliable foundation and a control plane to develop AI more quickly, operate it securely at scale, and enable teams and AI agents to collaborate starting from a shared business context, regardless of where the data resides."