Snowflake unveils platform upgrades for CoCo, CoWork
Tue, 2nd Jun 2026 (Today)
Snowflake is launching a selection of new products and capabilities at its Summit conference, including a fully managed streaming service, expanded AI security controls, and significant updates to its agentic tools, Cortex Code and Snowflake Intelligence.
A significant portion of Snowflake's Summit announcements centres on security for AI workloads. The company is adding an AI security package to its "Trust Center" product, which codifies best practices for how agents are configured, what credentials they use, and whether they access private data.
Snowflake is also introducing data exfiltration policies that allow administrators to define rules governing where data can be moved. Attempts by agents or users to violate those policies can be programmed to result in the operation being blocked rather than flagged after the fact.
Ransomware protection was also top of mind within the product updates. Building on immutable backups introduced over the past six months, Snowflake is adding multi-party authorisation for sensitive operations, requiring more than one approver before certain high-impact actions can proceed.
"The more autonomous agents are running in the enterprise, the more important it is to have these type of policies," said Christian Kleinerman, Senior Vice President of Product, Snowflake.
CoWork, the rebranded name for Snowflake Intelligence, is being positioned as a personal control plane rather than a menu of discrete agents. The update introduces personal skills, automation capabilities for background agents, and a new generation of artefacts and dashboards. Kleinerman described these changes as a reimagining of business intelligence built around AI, allowing users to create visualisations, save analyses, and share and collaborate on outputs within a single interface.
Snowflake is also bringing Adaptive Compute to general availability at Summit. Introduced at last year's Summit, the capability automatically right-sizes compute resources on customers' behalf, removing the need for manual warehouse size selection. The company says Adaptive Compute delivers analytics that are 1.5 to 1.6 times faster and DML performance that is up to 3.5 times faster than first-generation warehouses.
On interoperability, Kleinerman pushed back on the idea that enterprise data platforms should demand exclusivity.
"The notion of 'you need to put all your data in one platform and decide everything with that one vendor' ... I think that's a tale of the past. What we're offering is choice," he said.
For Cortex Code (now CoCo), Snowflake's developer-focused agentic product, the company is expanding the surfaces on which it is available. New integrations include an Excel plugin, a VS Code extension, and a standalone desktop application, CoCo Desktop. The product has already reached 770 customer accounts, according to Kleinerman, and CoWork grew 2x quarter over quarter in the most recent period.
The company is also introducing Cortex Sense, which automatically builds and enriches contextual metadata from customer data and activity on an ongoing basis. That context is then made available to both CoWork and Cortex Code (now rebranded to CoCo) to improve response quality without requiring manual configuration.
Horizon Context, a new layer within its Horizon Catalogue product, is also launching. The capability is built in part on the acquisition of Select Star, a company that extracts metadata from business intelligence systems, databases, and ETL tools - including Postgres, SQL Server, Tableau, and Power BI - and surfaces that context inside the catalogue. The layer also includes updates to semantic views, with the company describing an eventual goal of enabling digital twins of businesses through ontological relationships.