Snowflake tries to make business definitions enforceable for AI agents

Snowflake has announced new controls intended to ground AI agents in approved business definitions and govern how they reach models, tools and enterprise systems. Business Ontology, within Horizon Catalog, lets organisations record an official meaning and owner for concepts such as net revenue. Cortex AI Gateway is intended to centralise model access, tool invocation, usage monitoring and cost controls across agents.

The combination addresses two different causes of agent failure. Semantic drift occurs when teams calculate or interpret the same term differently. Execution risk appears when an agent can call an unapproved model or tool, exceed a budget or act without a trace. Connecting a governed definition to the data that implements it, then recording agent actions against common policies, could make assurance more practical across a fragmented estate.

Availability and evidence need careful handling. Snowflake identifies some capabilities as general availability and others as public or private preview. Its sponsored survey finding that 55 per cent of executives blame weak business context for poor agent insights is a vendor-sponsored result, not an independent market fact. Customers should test whether definitions propagate consistently outside Snowflake, whether policy survives cross-cloud tool calls and whether the audit trail captures the full decision path. A catalogue entry is not governance unless someone owns it, reviews it and can stop a conflicting action.

AI for Leaders: Governance, Risk & Why Strategy Must Come First

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