From Agent to Application: Extending the Power of Snowflake Cortex Agents with Sigma
Table of Contents
The launch of Snowflake Intelligence, powered by Cortex Agents, gives customers a platform to deploy intelligent agents on their enterprise data. These agents can securely reason across both structured and unstructured data to answer complex questions, such as "Why are sales down?" or “What’s driving customer churn?”
After investing time and resources into building a trusted Cortex Agent, many organizations face a critical next step: How do you put that intelligence into the hands of every business user, executive, or external client who needs it? And what is the path forward from answer to action?
Sending users to a separate portal or requiring custom front-end development can be complex and fragmented. Sigma solves that by bringing Cortex Agents directly into the single, analytical environment that teams are using. Every workbook can become a fully interactive data application, extending the reach of your agents beyond analysis and replacing outdated, decentralized workflows.
Scaling AI Across Workflows and Applications
The integration between Sigma and Snowflake Cortex Agents makes it easy to expose agent outputs to a much broader audience using a capability that already exists: the Sigma workbook.
By embedding Cortex Agents within the workbook, users unlock immediate flexibility and scale. This capability allows teams to rapidly deploy highly customized data applications that govern and transform core operational workflows and business processes. Unlike off-the-shelf SaaS solutions, these applications are tailored to your exact needs and built directly on warehouse data. Any user can call an agent to enrich data and drive deeper analysis, transforming the workbook into a launchpad for AI-powered workflows. Furthermore, builders can combine that same agent output with Sigma’s visualizations and actions to create robust, custom AI-driven data applications that scale across teams.
This approach turns the intelligence surfaced by Cortex Agents into practical data applications that drive real business execution.
How It Works: Calling Cortex Agents from Sigma
Sigma serves as the flexible interface that transforms a Cortex Agent into an actionable experience. The mechanism is simple:
- AI Enrichment: Select data in Sigma and trigger a
CALL_CORTEX_AGENT_APIaction to invoke a pre-built Cortex Agent in Snowflake. - Context in Place: The agent returns rich, contextual responses directly into the Sigma workbook, enriching the data instantly.
- Immediate Action: Users can immediately explore, visualize, or operationalize those insights—the why—without switching tools or losing context.
This seamless workflow extends the reach of your AI platform, allowing teams to scale trusted, governed AI across the enterprise.
"Customers invest significant time and resources into building highly governed and trusted enterprise agents. With the general availability of Snowflake Intelligence, global enterprises can now infuse that intelligence directly into their existing tools and workflows—connecting insight and execution across the business. Our partnership with Sigma extends this vision, empowering joint customers to move seamlessly from AI-powered discovery to hands-on analysis and business execution, democratizing trusted intelligence across the entire organization."
— Jeff Hollan, Head of Cortex AI Agents, Snowflake
Start Building AI-Powered Applications
The integration of Cortex Agents and Sigma redefines how organizations operationalize AI, turning every agent into a building block for collaborative, AI-powered applications. By combining the governed intelligence of Cortex Agents with Sigma’s intuitive UI, any spreadsheet-capable user can securely build and deploy AI applications at scale.
Together, Cortex Agents and Sigma empower teams to act on intelligence in real time, replacing fragmented spreadsheets and manual processes with interactive, governed, and scalable applications. This centralized approach guarantees measurable business impact and data consistency at scale.
Learn more about bringing the power of AI to your business with Snowflake and Sigma:
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