Snowflake announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft that will empower 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 state-of-the-art models available for use on Microsoft Azure regions within Snowflake, and optimised to reason across audio, video, and text in real-time. Now, thousands of global enterprises will be able to create data agents powered by OpenAI’s models in the secure boundary of Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud — ultimately saving businesses time and money.
“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.”
By bringing OpenAI’s models to Cortex AI through an integration with Azure OpenAI Service, Snowflake further solidifies its leadership in providing users with frontier AI models within the same unified governance framework as their data. Snowflake’s cross-region and cross-cloud AI inference also enables global customers to seamlessly access OpenAI’s models from any cloud or region, without needing complex integrations or manual setup. Access to these models is secured with Snowflake’s strong security guarantees through deep integrations with Microsoft Azure, 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. Snowflake Horizon Catalog’s strong enterprise-grade compliance, security, privacy, discovery, and collaboration capabilities natively integrated into Cortex AI allows users to focus on driving impact with OpenAI’s models.
“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.”
Introducing OpenAI to the AI data cloud through Azure OpenAI service integration
According to a recent MIT Technology Review Insights report, Data Strategies for AI Leaders, 59% of respondents cited data governance, security, or privacy as a challenge to deploying generative AI. For today’s enterprises, trust and security are paramount to the success of AI initiatives. With OpenAI’s models available directly in Cortex AI through Azure OpenAI Service, enterprises benefit from Snowflake’s built-in data governance, access controls, and monitoring, enabling customers to protect their most sensitive information.
With OpenAI’s models in the AI Data Cloud, joint customers of Snowflake and Microsoft can now seamlessly 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.
In addition to OpenAI’s models, Snowflake offers various models from leading providers including Anthropic, DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral, and more, alongside Snowflake’s Arctic open source language and embedding models. Snowflake is committed to making the top-performing models seamlessly accessible to users within Cortex AI, allowing customers the choice and flexibility to select the best model for their specific use case.
Snowflake brings data agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams
Through this expanded partnership, Snowflake is collaborating with Microsoft to make Snowflake Cortex Agents available for end users in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams (anticipated general availability in June 2025). Powered by Cortex AI, Cortex Agents will allow Microsoft’s enterprise customers to interact with their structured and unstructured Snowflake data in natural language directly from within Microsoft apps — streamlining their ability to ask questions and get insights from the core Microsoft tools they use every day. With this integration, AI-driven insights become more accessible for users at every skill level, improving productivity and helping fuel better decision-making across the enterprise. Additionally, developers can also 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. Leading data and engineering teams are already leveraging Cortex AI through Microsoft Copilot to accelerate business insights.
