Snowflake gives AI agents a shared business dictionary—but the definitions still need owners

One term, competing answers

Snowflake on Tuesday announced Business Ontology, a tool intended to give AI agents a shared set of company-approved definitions for terms such as net revenue. It is part of a broader push to make agents more useful on corporate data without letting their actions go unchecked.snowflake

The problem is not just whether an AI model can read a spreadsheet. Different departments can calculate the same metric differently, so agents drawing on different sources may produce conflicting answers. Snowflake says customers will be able to assign an owner to a definition and link it to the tables and views that implement it.snowflake +1

The human work behind the dictionary

The company says customers can import terms from a spreadsheet or another catalog using its CoCo coding agent. The imported definitions are marked as drafts for review, rather than automatically becoming official. Approved definitions are intended to take priority over competing inferences from Cortex Sense, Snowflake’s context engine.snowflake +1

That does not settle disagreements for the business. Sales, finance and operations may each have legitimate but different definitions of revenue or a customer. HFS Research analyst Ashish Chaturvedi told InfoWorld that companies must either reconcile those meanings or keep them as distinct, clearly identified terms—and revisit them when products, pricing or reporting rules change.infoworld

Controls are not a guarantee

Snowflake also expanded Cortex AI Gateway, an existing agent-governance layer introduced in July. The company says it can apply permissions, track agent activity and control spending. New tools include isolated environments for running agent-written code and detection of potential agent misuse.snowflake +1

Isolation may limit damage, but it does not prove an agent’s calculations are correct or stop all misuse of data a user is already allowed to access, InfoWorld’s analysts cautioned.infoworld

What customers can use

Business Ontology is expected to enter public preview soon, rather than being generally available now. The gateway is generally available, while the sandbox and misuse-detection features are in private preview.snowflake +1 Snowflake told ETEnterpriseAI it could not provide a standard estimate of savings or implementation time because outcomes depend on the customer.enterpriseai

The effort comes as competitors pursue similar ways to supply business context: Databricks introduced Genie Ontology in June to build a knowledge graph for its own agents.itdaily Snowflake is also adding scheduled workflows for its agents, according to Enterprise Times, extending the importance of consistent definitions beyond one-off questions.enterprisetimes