Snowflake has given its AI agents a second shift. At Expedition 2026 on November 3, the data-cloud company announced always-on CoCo and CoWork Bots that keep working in the background, inherit the user’s access rights, and surface only when a decision or sign-off is needed, alongside governed business context and spending controls. The pitch is agents that know what the business means, not just where its data lives.
Bots that work while users are away
CoCo is Snowflake’s coding agent for data teams, and CoWork is its personal work agent for knowledge workers. The new Bots act like an autonomous chief of staff: given a high-level goal such as preparing briefings for every customer meeting or keeping data pipelines healthy, they plan and complete the work themselves.
Bots inherit the user’s exact access rights, role context and permissions, and operate strictly within governed boundaries in Snowflake. That constraint is the point: an agent that can act in company tools without a human watching needs the same permissions as the human it stands in for, no more.
Availability matters here, and Snowflake is careful with it. The Bots are in private preview soon, not generally available, while CoCo Automations, the Async Agent API and Skills and Plugin Sharing are generally available now. Snowflake for Slack, CoCo for Excel and Sheets, and Snowflake Mobile sit in public preview.
One definition of net revenue, everywhere
The second announcement, Business Ontology, tackles a quieter failure: the dashboard, the analyst and the agent giving three different answers to the same question. Teams approve official definitions for concepts such as net revenue, assign each an accountable owner, and link it directly to the tables and views that implement it.
Human-approved definitions take precedence over competing inferences when agents assemble answers, with Semantic Views calculating the definition and Cortex Sense inferring what is not already defined. Every change is logged, so when an auditor asks what net revenue meant in a past quarter and who signed off, the answer is a lookup.
Business Ontology is in public preview soon, and it lives inside Horizon Context, the governed business-context home within Snowflake Horizon Catalog. Snowflake says more than 14,500 customers use its AI Data Cloud, with CoCo used by more than 9,100 accounts and CoWork by more than 5,800, measured over the last four weeks of the quarter ended July 31.
One front door for every agent
Cortex AI Gateway is the single front door through which agents connect to models, tools and enterprise systems. It applies one set of policies across clouds, frameworks and providers, extends human access controls to agent calls through MCP servers, and tracks usage so teams can attribute spending and enforce hard budget limits.
The spending control answers a problem the site has tracked before: agents approving their own spending is already a live governance question, and CrowdStrike’s kill switch for rogue agents shows vendors racing to add an off switch. Snowflake’s answer is quieter — a budget limit and an audit trail before the agent acts, not after.
Snowflake also announced Cortex Training, for tailoring open-weight models to a company’s domain and data in a serverless setup, with benchmarks claiming up to 61% lower cost than existing serverless training options. The figure is Snowflake’s own benchmark, based on pricing published October 22, not an independent test.
Why It Matters
Enterprise agents fail differently from chatbots. A chatbot’s wrong answer is embarrassing; an agent’s wrong action moves money, changes data or grants access. Snowflake’s bet is that governance — shared definitions, inherited permissions, spending limits and audit trails — is what turns an agent pilot into something a large company can actually run.
The timing matters too. Agents are spreading faster than IT and security teams can govern them, by Snowflake’s own account, and vendors from CrowdStrike to OpenAI are shipping controls in parallel. The company that owns the governed data layer has a plausible claim to own the agent control plane as well.
Our read
Read the availability labels, not the headlines. The always-on Bots are the story, but they are the least available piece here — private preview soon — while the generally available pieces are automations and sharing features. Snowflake is selling a direction of travel, and buyers should judge it on the Bots’ arrival, not the announcement.
The stronger claim is the boring one. Shared definitions with owners and audit trails solve a real, daily enterprise pain — teams arguing over whose number is right — and that pain exists whether or not agents ever become autonomous coworkers. If the Bots stall, Business Ontology and the Gateway still have work to do.
Background
Expedition 2026 is Snowflake’s first edition of an event expanded from its BUILD developer conference, held online over three days from November 3. Snowflake introduced Cortex AI Gateway in July 2026, so this week’s news extends an existing governance product rather than launching the control plane from scratch.
Source: CoCo and CoWork announcement, governance announcement
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