Snowflake BUILD 2025 Recap
The biggest announcements for developers from Snowflake BUILD 2025. The era of Agentic Native Apps is here.
Snowflake BUILD is always a developer-first conference, and 2025 did not disappoint. While Summit focuses on the “Data Cloud” vision, BUILD is about the code. The clear theme this year? Agentic Workflows.
1. Agentic Native Apps#
The headline announcement was the “Agentic Native App”. Developers can now package not just Streamlit UIs and UDFs, but full-blown Cortex Agents into a Native App. This allows ISVs to build autonomous bots that can perform multi-step tasks (e.g., “Analyze the last 3 months of sales and email me the outliers”) installed directly into a customer’s account.
2. Cortex 2.0: Multi-Modal and Faster#
Cortex has expanded beyond text.
- Cortex Vision: Run SQL queries against images? Yes.
SELECT snowflake.cortex.describe_image(image_url)is now in Public Preview. - Fine-Tuning API: A simplified API to fine-tune Llama 4 and Mistral models on your proprietary data without leaving Snowflake governance boundaries.
3. Snowflake Intelligence#
The new “Snowflake Intelligence” interface is rolling out. It’s no longer just a chatbot; it’s an orchestration layer
that connects Cortex Analyst (Text-to-SQL) with Cortex Search (RAG). For developers, the INTELLIGENCE_API
allows you to embed this same “talk to your data” experience into your own custom apps.
4. DevOps Improvements#
- Database Change Management (DCM) GA: The native schema evolution tools have finally graduated.
- Python Worksheets 2.0: IntelliSense is now powered by a specialized Copilot model trained on Snowpark, making it significantly smarter at predicting DataFrame operations.
Summary#
Snowflake is telling us clearly: The future isn’t just about storing data; it’s about giving AI agents the tools to act on it. If you haven’t started playing with Cortex Agents yet, now is the time.