tools

Snowflake Cortex Analyst

Snowflake Cortex Analyst converts natural-language questions about Snowflake data into SQL and answers for business users.

Cortex Analyst is a managed Snowflake feature for building applications that answer questions about structured data. It uses semantic models or semantic views to provide business definitions, metrics, relationships, and verified examples for SQL generation.

Developers can access it through a REST API or integrate it into applications such as Streamlit apps, Slack, Teams, and custom chat interfaces. Snowflake recommends transitioning to Cortex Agents, which adds unstructured-data retrieval, tool calling, conversation threads, and multi-step orchestration. Generated SQL also incurs standard virtual warehouse charges.

Features

Converts natural-language questions into SQL
Uses semantic models and semantic views for business context
Supports verified queries to improve SQL generation
Provides a REST API for application integration
Supports multi-turn conversations
Runs models inside Snowflake's security perimeter
Tracks usage through CORTEX_ANALYST_USAGE_HISTORY
Supports evaluation of semantic views and generated SQL

Use cases

Build chat applications for self-service business analytics
Let nontechnical users query structured Snowflake data
Embed natural-language analytics in internal business tools
Generate SQL for Streamlit applications
Evaluate semantic views against verified business queries

Pros

Cons

Latest updates

2026-11-04 HTML reports (Preview)
HTML reports
2026-11-04 Backups for Snowflake Storage for Apache Iceberg™ tables (General availability)
Backups for Snowflake Storage for Apache Iceberg™ tables
2026-11-04 Background runs and additional supplementary tools for agents in the Snowflake-managed MCP server
2026-11-03 CoCo Desktop v1.24.0
2026-11-03 Snowflake CoCo for Excel and Snowflake CoCo for Google Sheets (Preview)
Snowflake CoCo for Excel and Snowflake CoCo for Google Sheets

Capabilities

Ask in plain language — “Use AI to accurately convert natural language to SQL” source
Writes SQL — “Use AI to accurately convert natural language to SQL” source
API — “If you invoke Cortex Analyst directly through the standalone Analyst API, it’s billed per 1,000 messages.” source

Get it

Documentation

Security

SOC 2 Type II — “The SOC2 Type 2 report is an independent auditor’s attestation of the security controls that Snowflake has had in place during the report’s coverage period.” source
SOC 2 — “The SOC2 Type 2 report is an independent auditor’s attestation of the security controls that Snowflake has had in place during the report’s coverage period.” source
ISO 27001 — “Snowflake - ISO 27001; 27017; 27018_2026” source
ISO 42001 — “Snowflake Achieves Prestigious ISO/IEC/IEC 42001 Certification, Demonstrating Commitment to Responsible AI Practices” source

Pricing

Prices checked: 2026-11-05

Cortex Analyst

$2.00 per AI Credit (global routing)
$2.20 per AI Credit (regional routing)

Through Cortex Agents: token-based AI Credit pricing
Standalone Analyst API: billed per 1,000 messages
Executing generated SQL incurs standard virtual warehouse compute charges

Official website