The Pulse
Snowflake Puts CoCo and CoWork on Always-On Agent Duty
Snowflake announced CoCo and CoWork Bots at its November 3, 2026, Expedition event, describing agents that work in the background and seek approval when needed. The company says they operate within users’ access rights, while related automa
AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked ·
Snowflake is pitching a version of enterprise AI that works without waiting for each prompt, while promising that people retain control over consequential decisions. At its November 3, 2026, Expedition event, the company announced CoCo and CoWork Bots, which it says can plan and carry out work in the background but operate within a user’s access rights and ask for approval when needed. The bots are not generally available: Snowflake lists them as “in private preview soon.”
Background work, bounded by user permissions
Snowflake describes CoCo as a coding agent for data teams and CoWork as a personal work agent for knowledge workers. The new bots are intended to take a high-level goal—such as preparing briefings for customer meetings or keeping data pipelines healthy—and handle the work in the background. They inherit the user’s access rights, role context and permissions, according to the announcement. Snowflake says they surface when a critical decision or final approval is required.
That promise puts autonomy and oversight side by side: the agents are meant to act continuously, but only within the boundaries of the person they represent. “AI agents are reshaping how companies operate, and the difference between agents that guess and agents that know comes down to data,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake. He said the company’s data, context and governance controls underpin its plans for agents that understand how a business operates.
Scheduled jobs keep an audit trail
Separate from the new bots, Snowflake says CoCo Automations can schedule repeated workflows for data teams, with an audit trail and task history for each run. Teams can review what CoCo did, then suspend or rerun a job. CoWork can schedule recurring analysis for business teams; Snowflake’s example is a sales leader receiving a weekly report on performance, emerging trends and areas needing attention.
The company also announced an Async Agent API for longer, multi-step CoWork tasks that continue in the background and resume if interrupted. Snowflake lists both CoCo Automations and the Async Agent API as generally available. That status differs from several other additions: Snowflake for Slack, CoCo for Excel and Sheets, and Snowflake Mobile are in public preview.
Agents move into Slack, spreadsheets and phones
Snowflake for Slack brings CoCo and CoWork into a shared bot experience in Slack channels. CoCo for Excel and Sheets lets users ask plain-language questions about Snowflake data from spreadsheets, with the data remaining protected in Snowflake, the company says. Snowflake Mobile combines the two agents: business users can ask questions of governed data and take actions with approval, while developers can continue coding sessions, manage builds and steer actions from a phone.
The announcement also describes features intended to carry context between tasks and users. CoCo and CoWork Memory stores past context and decisions, which users can view, update or delete. Profiles add team- and role-specific context; administrators can set CoWork access and routing instructions that end users cannot remove. Snowflake says shared skills and plugins let users distribute CoCo workflows across an organization with governance controls.
Adoption figures use a July quarter-end baseline
Snowflake says CoWork is used by more than 5,800 accounts and CoCo by more than 9,100. Those figures reflect the average of the last four weeks of the quarter ended July 31, 2026, based on accounts using the respective features weekly, according to the release. The company names Cisco, Docusign, Klarent, Pacific Life Insurance Company, Shelter Mutual Insurance Company and United Rentals among organizations using both products.
For Cisco, Srini Namineni, SVP and Chief Automation Officer, said its Customer Experience teams use specialized agents built in Snowflake to identify upsell and renewal opportunities, while CoCo helps engineers migrate corporate data, convert legacy code and build pipelines. The release presents those deployments alongside its rollout schedule: the recurring-work automation is generally available, several integrations are in public preview, and the always-on bots are still awaiting private preview.