What is Business Ontology and when can customers use it?

It is an extension of Snowflake's semantic views that lets organizations establish approved definitions used across the organization. It is currently in private preview and headed to public preview soon.

What new governance features does Cortex AI Gateway add?

The updates include agent abuse detection, observability and tracing, Cortex sandboxes, AI cost governance, dynamic model routing and tools integration using technology from Snowflake's Natoma acquisition.

What does Cortex Training let customers do?

It allows customers to tailor open-weight AI models with their own proprietary information via post-training, without managing the underlying infrastructure or needing vast arrays of GPUs.

Large Language ModelsAI Business & IndustrySiliconANGLE AI1h agoNov 4, 2026, 01:00 JST

Snowflake adds Business Ontology, agent governance at Expedition 2026

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3 Key Points

What happened
At Expedition 2026, Snowflake unveiled a Business Ontology framework that gives organizations shared approved definitions, plus expanded Cortex AI Gateway governance including agent abuse detection and cost controls.
Why it matters
Shared approved definitions are meant to stop two AI agents from giving incompatible answers to the same business question, and the added governance lets IT and security teams monitor and restrict what agents do.

WHO IT HITSEnterprise data, IT and security teams running AI agents on Snowflake stand to gain centralized controls over what agents can access and spend, while business users in functions like sales operations may build agents without writing code.

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Context & Analysis

Snowflake's announcements come as it positions its data platform as the place where AI agents both learn what business data means and are held to enterprise rules. The Business Ontology framework extends its existing semantic views so that approved definitions are shared, addressing a scenario where two agents answer the same question differently despite accurate underlying data. Expanded Cortex AI Gateway capabilities build on a gateway Snowflake introduced in July 2026, adding abuse detection, observability and cost governance to existing security mechanisms like data masking and access restrictions. Alongside this, Cortex Training enters public preview to let customers specialize open-weight models with proprietary data without managing infrastructure, a capability the company frames as useful for sovereign control over AI models. A separate expanded partnership with Oracle makes Snowflake available as a first-party service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Competitors including SAP and Salesforce are pursuing similar control layers for enterprise agents, with Snowflake approaching the problem from the data platform side.

FAQ

What is Business Ontology and when can customers use it?: It is an extension of Snowflake's semantic views that lets organizations establish approved definitions used across the organization. It is currently in private preview and headed to public preview soon.
What new governance features does Cortex AI Gateway add?: The updates include agent abuse detection, observability and tracing, Cortex sandboxes, AI cost governance, dynamic model routing and tools integration using technology from Snowflake's Natoma acquisition.
What does Cortex Training let customers do?: It allows customers to tailor open-weight AI models with their own proprietary information via post-training, without managing the underlying infrastructure or needing vast arrays of GPUs.

SiliconANGLE AIRead Original Article

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Also reported by Snowflake AI Blog

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