- Snowflake’s partnership with Microsoft extends to deliver OpenAI’s models directly to customers in Snowflake Cortex AI on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry
- Snowflake launches new native integration enabling customers to leverage Snowflake Cortex Agents within their Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 apps
AI Data company Snowflake has announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft that will enable enterprises to build easy, efficient, and trusted AI-powered apps and data agents with OpenAI’s models directly in Snowflake Cortex AI, Snowflake’s fully managed AI service. Snowflake Cortex AI will integrate Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in Azure AI Foundry, making OpenAI’s models available for use on Microsoft Azure regions within Snowflake, and optimised to reason across audio, video and text in real-time.
“We’re expanding our long-standing partnership with Microsoft to deliver the best of OpenAI’s innovations directly to our customers, further advancing our promise to bring easy, efficient, and trusted AI to enterprises around the world,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake. “There’s enormous power in our customers being able to use OpenAI models directly in Snowflake’s secure platform, unlocking multimodal, agentic, and conversational AI use cases that drive high impact.”
The joint solution provides users with frontier AI models within the same unified governance as their data. Access to these models is secured with Snowflake’s security guarantees within Microsoft Azure’s framework, providing protected connections for customers on any cloud provider. OpenAI’s models provide advanced reasoning and instruct capabilities, allowing users to quickly build scalable AI apps and data agents that deliver accurate, grounded insights using their enterprise data. Snowflake customers achieve this because OpenAI’s models run within the security boundary of Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud.
“Enterprises are looking to leverage their proprietary data to create AI differentiation in ways that bring the richest experiences to the world, and the Snowflake partnership with Azure OpenAI Service through Azure AI Foundry will empower our joint customers to deliver intuitive and trustworthy app experiences even faster,” said Asha Sharma, CVP, Head of Product, Microsoft AI Platform. “It’s our shared data-centric approach to AI that helps break down barriers to production for businesses of all sizes.”
With OpenAI’s models in the AI Data Cloud, joint customers of Snowflake and Microsoft can now combine structured and unstructured data to deliver a richer, more engaging user experience. OpenAI’s models will be available on select Microsoft Azure regions in the United States, with plans to expand globally, the timings of which are yet to be announced.
In addition to OpenAI’s models, Snowflake offers models from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral and more, alongside Snowflake’s Arctic open source language and embedding models.
Snowflake is Bringing Data Agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams
Snowflake is collaborating with Microsoft to make Snowflake Cortex Agents available for end users in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams (anticipated general availability is in June 2025). Powered by Cortex AI, Cortex Agents are envisioned to allow Microsoft’s enterprise customers to interact with their structured and unstructured Snowflake data in natural language directly within Microsoft apps — streamlining their ability to ask questions and get insights from the core Microsoft tools they use every day. Developers will be able to leverage these Snowflake features through convenient REST APIs to customise and build secure natural language interfaces between Microsoft 365 apps and their data in Snowflake. Apparently leading data and engineering teams are already leveraging Cortex AI through Microsoft Copilot to accelerate business insights.
Article contains some forward-looking statements, and should not be solely relied upon as a prediction of future events
