Snowflake launches Business Ontology and Cortex AI Gateway, bringing…
At Expedition 2026, Snowflake announced Business Ontology and Cortex AI Gateway. The former provides AI agents with approved business term definitions and links them to enterprise data, while the latter serves as a unified control layer that manages agents, models, and tool calls, enforcing access policies, authentication, and permissions. Cortex AI Gateway also offers fine-grained authorization, prompt injection and jailbreak protection, cost governance, and dynamic model routing, and logs agent activity to monitor usage and spending. CoCo and CoWork add automation capabilities and background Bots that can inherit user permissions and request approval when sign-off is required, and will also integrate with Slack, Excel, and Google Sheets.
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Snowflake has introduced Business Ontology, Cortex AI Gateway and new capabilities in its CoCo and CoWork products to help enterprises deploy AI agents in production with business context, governance and autonomous execution.
The announcements were made at Snowflake Expedition 2026 on November 4. The company said the new capabilities would allow AI agents to access approved business definitions, operate under enterprise security policies and carry out recurring tasks across data and business teams.
Business Ontology, a new capability within Snowflake Horizon Catalog, gives AI agents access to approved definitions of business terms and links them to underlying enterprise data. This is intended to ensure that different agents and employees use consistent definitions for metrics such as net revenue.
Cortex AI Gateway, also part of Horizon Catalog, provides a central control layer for managing agents, models and tool calls. It applies enterprise access policies, authentication and permissions across different AI providers and frameworks.
“The enterprises that win won’t be the ones with the most agents. They’ll be the ones whose agents know exactly what the business means by accessing the right data, abide by governance and guardrails specified, and can account for actions taken by agents,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake.
The gateway also includes tools for fine-grained authorisation, protection against prompt injection and jailbreaks, cost governance and dynamic model routing. Its observability capabilities record agent activity, allowing enterprises to monitor usage and spending.
Snowflake also announced new automation capabilities for CoCo, its coding agent for data teams, and CoWork, its personal work agent for knowledge workers.
With CoCo Automations, data teams can configure recurring workflows that agents execute autonomously. These include pipeline health checks and weekly reports. Each execution maintains an audit trail and task history, allowing teams to review, suspend or rerun tasks.
The company is also introducing CoCo and CoWork Bots, which can operate in the background and carry out tasks based on high-level instructions. The bots inherit users' access rights and permissions and seek approval when a decision or sign-off is required.
The products will also integrate with workplace tools such as Slack, Excel and Google Sheets.
The company said these challenges have prevented enterprises from moving AI agents beyond pilot projects into production deployments.