Aug 28, 2026: Snowflake recommends transitioning from Cortex Analyst to Cortex Agents¶

Snowflake recommends transitioning to Cortex Agents, which supports every Cortex Analyst capability with higher answer quality. Snowflake adds new natural language analytics capabilities to Cortex Agents.

Existing applications continue to work, and the Cortex Analyst REST API remains available.

What transitioning involves¶

Cortex Agents uses Cortex Analyst as its tool for querying structured data, so the transition is a change to how you invoke it rather than a rebuild:

• Your semantic views carry over unchanged. Cortex Agents uses the same semantic views for SQL generation, so you don’t need to rebuild your semantic layer.
• Your verified queries are stored in the semantic view, so they continue to apply.
• Cortex Agents adds capabilities that the standalone API doesn’t offer, including retrieval over unstructured data with Cortex Search, tool calling, threads that maintain conversation context, and orchestration across multiple steps.

For more information, see Cortex Agents and Add tools.