Snowflake Advances Enterprise AI Agents with New Business Ontology and Governance Capabilities

Snowflake is advancing enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with new Business Ontology and Cortex AI Gateway innovations designed to help organizations build, manage and deploy more reliable AI agents. Announced on November 3, 2026, at Snowflake Expedition 2026, the latest developments focus on improving business context, strengthening AI governance and providing organizations with greater control over autonomous AI operations.

As businesses increasingly adopt AI agents to automate workflows, analyse enterprise information and support operational decisions, maintaining accurate business context and data security has become a major challenge. Snowflake aims to address these concerns by bringing business definitions, security policies and governance controls directly into its AI Data Cloud ecosystem.

Business Ontology Provides Trusted Context for AI Agents

One of the major announcements is Snowflake Business Ontology, a new capability within Snowflake Horizon Catalog. It provides a centralised environment where organizations can establish and manage approved definitions of important business terms.

For example, different departments may calculate revenue, customer value or operational performance using different definitions. Such inconsistencies can lead to inaccurate AI-generated insights and conflicting business reports.

Business Ontology helps address this issue by connecting approved business definitions directly to underlying enterprise data. This allows AI agents to use consistent and authorised information when answering questions or performing business tasks.

The capability works alongside Semantic Views and Cortex Sense to provide a unified business context. While Business Ontology manages official definitions, Semantic Views support calculations, and Cortex Sense helps identify additional business context from available information.

Key capabilities include:

• Centralised Business Definitions: Establishes approved definitions for important business terms.
• Connected Enterprise Data: Links business concepts with relevant tables, views and data assets.
• Improved AI Accuracy: Helps AI agents generate more consistent and reliable responses.
• Transparent Data Management: Maintains records of definition changes and approvals.
• Reusable Business Context: Makes trusted business knowledge available across applications, teams and AI agents.

Cortex AI Gateway Strengthens Enterprise AI Governance

Alongside Business Ontology, Snowflake introduced enhancements to Cortex AI Gateway to provide centralised governance for enterprise AI agents.

As organizations connect AI agents with different models, tools, applications and enterprise systems, managing access permissions and monitoring activities can become increasingly complicated.

Cortex AI Gateway addresses these challenges by providing a central control point for managing AI connections, model usage and tool interactions. It helps organizations apply consistent security policies while maintaining visibility into agent activities.

Important capabilities include:

• Centralised AI Controls: Applies consistent governance policies across AI agents and connected systems.
• Agent Activity Monitoring: Records agent interactions, model usage, tool calls and operational activities.
• Security Protection: Helps detect potentially unauthorised agent activities and security risks.
• AI Cost Management: Provides visibility into AI spending and supports budget controls.
• Model Management: Helps organizations select appropriate AI models based on cost, performance and operational requirements.

Snowflake is also expanding its governance capabilities through features such as Cortex Sandboxes, Agent Abuse Detection and Agent Trace Intelligence, with availability varying by feature.

Helping Businesses Scale Autonomous AI Operations

The latest innovations reflect Snowflake’s broader strategy to help enterprises move beyond experimental AI projects towards practical, governed AI deployment.

The company is focusing on three important requirements for enterprise AI adoption: trusted business information, controlled AI execution and transparent operational management.

Organizations can use these capabilities to support applications across finance, sales, marketing, customer operations and data management. By providing AI agents with approved business definitions and consistent security policies, companies can reduce information inconsistencies and improve confidence in automated workflows.

Snowflake also highlighted existing customer adoption. Companies including Glean and Kargo are using Cortex AI Gateway, while dentsu and Merkle are using Business Ontology to establish trusted business definitions.

Conclusion

Snowflake’s latest Business Ontology and Cortex AI Gateway innovations represent an important development in enterprise AI and data governance. By combining approved business definitions with centralised security controls, monitoring and cost management, the company aims to make AI agents more reliable, accountable and suitable for business-critical operations.

As enterprises continue investing in agentic AI, the ability to maintain trusted data, manage autonomous activities and control AI-related costs will become increasingly important. Snowflake’s latest developments position its AI Data Cloud as a platform for organizations looking to expand AI adoption while maintaining enterprise-level governance and security.