Snowflake has officially launched Cortex AISQL in public preview, bringing advanced artificial intelligence capabilities directly into its SQL engine. This breakthrough enables enterprises to build scalable AI pipelines using familiar SQL commands, processing multimodal data—including text (public preview), images (public preview), and soon audio (public preview coming soon)—faster, more cost-effectively, and with deeper insights than ever before.

The AI-Driven Transformation of Data Analytics

Data analytics is undergoing a fundamental shift, powered by artificial intelligence. Modern organizations recognize that critical insights are no longer confined to traditional structured data but are increasingly embedded in unstructured sources such as documents, images, and audio files. Analytics workflows now require sophisticated, multistep processes to extract and synthesize insights from diverse sources, posing significant technical and operational challenges.

Addressing Enterprise Data Challenges

Organizations have long struggled to integrate disparate tools and skill sets to process multimodal data, resulting in inefficiencies and scalability bottlenecks. Snowflake’s Cortex AISQL addresses these challenges by embedding powerful generative AI directly into its SQL engine, enabling:

• Expressive and Composable AI Operators: Seamless integration of AI operators like FILTER and AGGREGATE into SQL, empowering tasks such as anomaly detection or image classification.
• Native Multimodal Data Support: The FILE data type allows referencing text, images, and audio directly within tables.
• Performance and Cost Improvements: Up to 70% query runtime reduction thanks to engine-level optimizations.

Real-World Impact: Toyota Material Handling Europe

Snowflake Cortex AISQL accelerated our development of our Service Technician application that enables our technicians to easily interact and analyze thousands of user manuals in multiple languages to solve customer problems faster than we could have imagined. The game changer for us has been how Cortex AISQL seamlessly integrates diverse data types, from text to images and beyond, paving a faster path from data to insights that transforms how our teams work.

Ahmad AI-Mashahedi, Lead Data Scientist for Toyota Material Handling Europe

Core Capabilities of Cortex AISQL

Cortex AISQL integrates AI capabilities into SQL, enabling sophisticated analysis across structured and unstructured data types.

• Unified AI Operations: Operators like AI_FILTER, AI_AGG, AI_CLASSIFY, and AI_SIMILARITY.
• Advanced Multistep Analytics: Enables workflows such as extracting, joining, and summarizing cross-source data.

Industry Applications

• Financial Services: Analyze regulatory documents and join them with internal holdings.
• Retail & E-commerce: Detect product quality issues by analyzing reviews.
• Healthcare: Link clinical notes with structured records to uncover treatment insights.

Performance and Cost Efficiency

Snowflake’s query engine leverages parallelism and batching for high-performance execution. Adaptive LLM Optimization dynamically chooses the best AI models for each task, balancing cost and accuracy.

Unlocking Deep Insights with Multistep Analytics

Analysts can now answer complex queries like:

What is the yearly revenue growth and market outlook for companies that have recently undergone a CEO change and operate in the renewable energy sector?

using a combination of AI-powered SQL operations—all within one environment.

Customer and Partner Perspectives

For decades, BI tools assumed data was clean and structured — but real decisions rely on messy, unstructured content like PDFs, images and receipts. Cortex AISQL removes that bottleneck, and with Sigma and Snowflake, turns human expertise into scalable, intelligent analysis.

Mike Palmer, CEO of Sigma. “

Bringing LLMs directly to SQL queries has been a game changer for analytics. What used to require complicated NLP or vision models can now be handled with a single line of SQL. We are excited to see how our joint customers can ask deeper questions and unlock insights previously out of reach.

Armin Efendic, Lead Partner Engineer of Hex

Cortex AISQL Availability

Conclusion

Snowflake Cortex AISQL is redefining enterprise data analytics by embedding powerful AI directly into SQL. This unified approach delivers faster, more cost-effective insights from both structured and unstructured data, empowering teams to build smart AI pipelines using tools they already know. The public preview is now open to all Snowflake customers, ushering in a new era for data-driven organizations.