June 02, 2025 — Snowflake Cortex AISQL — Preview

AI capability meets SQL operators across multimodal data

Snowflake announces the preview of Cortex AISQL, bringing powerful AI capabilities directly into Snowflake’s SQL engine. Cortex AISQL helps you build scalable AI pipelines across multimodal enterprise data with familiar SQL commands. You can now process text and images faster and more cost effectively while gaining deeper insights from structured and unstructured data.

The available Cortex AISQL functions include:

  • AI_FILTER: Evaluates a plain-language yes-or-no question against text or image input, allowing you to filter results in SELECT, WHERE, and JOIN clauses using AI capabilities.

  • AI_CLASSIFY: Classifies a text or image input into a single or multiple user-defined categories based on plain-language category definitions.

  • AI_AGG: Aggregates a text column and returns insights across multiple rows based on a user-defined prompt. This function is not subject to context window limitations.

  • AI_SUMMARIZE_AGG: Aggregates a text column and returns a summary across multiple rows. This function is not subject to context window limitations.

  • AI_SIMILARITY: Calculates the embedding similarity between two inputs without needing to explicitly create the embedding vectors.

  • AI_COMPLETE: Generates a completion for a given text string or image using one of several available LLMs. Use this function for generative AI tasks that aren’t covered by other functions.

Key benefits of Cortex AISQL include:

  • Expressive and Composable AI Operators: A new suite of AI-powered operators integrates seamlessly with familiar SQL primitives like FILTER and AGGREGATE, enabling more intuitive and powerful data manipulation.

  • Simplified AI Pipelines: Build advanced, multi-step AI pipelines with greater ease and efficiency using standard SQL.

  • Unified Analytics for All Data: Run analytics across structured and unstructured data within the same SQL query, breaking down data silos.

  • Native Multimodal Data Support: Cortex AISQL operators are designed to work fluidly across diverse modalities, eliminating the need for separate processing systems for text and image data.

  • Performance Enhancements: Improved query engine performance and scalability within Snowflake.

To get started, see Cortex AISQL.

Language: English