Michael Leone, VP & principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, thinks the roadmap is “ambitious,” noting the number of items announced that are “coming soon” or are in public preview. “These announcements are starting to blur together, with almost every vendor claiming their agents can reason, act, and transform the business,” he said, adding, “What makes this one worth slowing down on, at least for me, is that Snowflake is going after both halves of the enterprise at the same time. Intelligence is built for the business users who want answers and actions without writing SQL, and Cortex Code is built for the builders who actually have to put this into production.”
Most vendors pick one target, users or builders, and come back to the other later, he said, but Snowflake is putting both on the same governed data foundation. “[This] is a harder engineering problem, but I’d argue it’s a cleaner answer to the question enterprises are actually asking, which is how to open AI up to more people without losing control of the data underneath,” he said, noting that Snowflake has changed its approach from “let’s do it inside Snowflake,” to realizing that agentic AI only works if it’s interoperable with the rest of the stack.
Igor Ikonnikov, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, also sees the control plane play as part of an industry trend. “As always, the devil is in the details: what those platforms are composed of and how they offer to control AI agents,” he said. “Most platforms are built the old-fashioned way: All the controls are coded. Snowflake speaks about reusable analytics through saving the whole solution and reusing complete modules or models. It means that common semantics are still buried inside database models and code.”
