Snowflake boosts AI with real-time licensed content access

Techday NZ

04-06-2025

Snowflake has introduced Cortex Knowledge Extensions, allowing enterprises to supplement their AI agents with real-time, licensed content from third-party publishers, with Stack Overflow among the first partners to join the Snowflake Marketplace.
The introduction of Cortex Knowledge Extensions enables enterprise customers to enrich their AI applications and agents with updated, reliable content from publishers such as Stack Overflow, USA TODAY, and Packt. This approach ensures proper attribution and licensing of content, distinguishing it from other systems that use scraped material without consent from original publishers.
According to Snowflake, this new capability is designed to address challenges faced by both enterprises and publishers. Enterprises often struggle to gain access to timely external information for their AI systems, limiting accuracy and depth of insight. Meanwhile, publishers are seeking a secure and fair way to allow their content to be used by enterprise AI, with assurance of both compensation and control.
"Building powerful AI apps and agents at scale hinges on enterprises having access to a wealth of internal and external data that adds rich context to AI outputs. Snowflake is raising the bar on enterprise-wide collaboration to make it even easier for customers to fuel their AI initiatives with AI-ready data and harness the power of agentic apps — regardless of whether the data and apps reside within their own four walls or come from trusted third-party sources. Our latest innovations enable teams to turn possibilities into reality with data and AI, all without worrying about security and governance risk," Prasanna Krishanan, Head of Apps & Collaboration and Horizon at Snowflake, commented on the launch.
With Cortex Knowledge Extensions, publishers are able to list their content, such as news articles, textbooks, and research papers, on the Snowflake Marketplace. Enterprises can then purchase this content and integrate it into their AI-powered apps and agents, including Cortex Agents, Cortex Search, and the soon-to-be-available Snowflake Intelligence. This functionality enables AI systems to provide responses informed by timely and relevant information while allowing publishers to monetise their intellectual property under agreed licensing terms.
The mechanism for delivering content through Cortex Knowledge Extensions relies on retrieval-augmented generation and is underpinned by Snowflake's Zero-ETL Sharing functionality. This setup empowers publishers to revoke access to content if necessary, while always displaying clear attribution and links to the original source, thereby enhancing reliability and provenance.
Alongside Cortex Knowledge Extensions, Snowflake has introduced Semantic Model Sharing, which is currently in private preview. Semantic Model Sharing allows enterprises to integrate and interact with AI-ready structured data within their Snowflake Cortex AI applications — whether the data originates from internal sources or third-party providers.
The use of semantic models helps ensure consistency in how data and business concepts are defined and applied across different systems, contributing to more trustworthy and accurate AI outputs. By mapping internal data to standardised semantic models, enterprises can accelerate insights, support more uniform decision-making, and access industry-standard metrics while maintaining governance and version control.
Snowflake reports that these advances are intended to eliminate the manual effort required to create semantic models internally, while supporting high-quality, context-rich, and accurate AI responses. Users can directly interact with their data using Semantic Model Sharing in Cortex AI, including Cortex Analyst, Cortex Agents, and Snowflake Intelligence.
In addition to content and model sharing, Snowflake is adding support for Agentic Native Apps in its marketplace. This feature provides customers with access to third-party agentic applications, which can securely combine provider and consumer data within the enterprise's governance framework. Data remains within the customer's environment while agents perform tasks such as portfolio management and optimisation, using proprietary algorithms and datasets.
Currently, Snowflake Marketplace connects enterprises with over 750 providers, offering more than 3,000 live data, application, and AI products. The introduction of Agentic Native Apps is intended to give providers new ways to distribute and monetise their offerings while allowing enterprises to drive additional value from their data without compromising privacy or security.