Snowflake introduced several platform updates designed to expand interoperability, improve performance and reduce operational cost. The focus of these enhancements was artificial intelligence and how Snowflake intends to help customers embrace the agentic revolution. A key focus for Snowflake has been providing tools for unstructured data. The company unveiled new additions in June to its Cortex portfolio, which expanded capabilities to query data across diverse formats, including unstructured image, audio or long-form text files, according to Christian Kleinerman, executive vice president of product at Snowflake. “Cortex Analyst is our ability to do text-to-structured data. Cortex Search is our hybrid search capability that does semantic search and keyword search to do retrieval on unstructured data and to orchestrate it amongst those two multiple data sets of … Cortex agents.” Snowflake is also seeking to improve the ease and speed of structured and unstructured data integration. The company announced Openflow, a managed service that’s designed to reduce the time and effort spent wrangling ingest pipelines while supporting batch and streaming workloads. Openflow can be implemented in multiple environments, according to Kleinerman. “Openflow has two deployment models. One is typical Snowflake; it’s Snowflake-managed resources. It’s in the cloud, but there’s also BYOC, bring your own cloud, which can be deployed in the customer’s virtual private cloud.” Snowflake’s role in the enterprise is evolving from providing data management tools to serving as a platform on which other businesses can be built. Kleinerman cited Capital One Financial Corp. as an example, which recently announced two new features, built on the Snowflake platform, for its enterprise B2B Capital One Software division.