Snowflake Turns AI Agents Into Always-On Systems
Snowflake's Coco and Cowork agents now plan and complete tasks in the background once users set broad goals.
Updated on Nov. 3, 2026 in Remote Work
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Snowflake announced on November 3, 2026, at Snowflake Expedition 2026 that its Coco and Cowork AI agents are becoming always-on autonomous systems. The company also unveiled Cortex AI Gateway and Cortex Training for enterprise agent security, cost control, and custom model building.
Why it matters
Snowflake says AI is shifting from software that waits for prompts to systems that continuously perform tasks, and the company aims to help enterprises deploy an AI colleague that handles responsibilities beyond answering questions. The Cortex AI Gateway acts as a single channel for all enterprise-operated agents, with a Cost Governance feature that breaks down AI spending by user, team, department, or agent.
Snowflake reports that Coco, its coding agent, is used by over 9,100 accounts and Cowork, its task agent, by over 5,800 accounts. The figures are company-reported, and the source does not provide comparisons to prior periods or independent verification.
The players
Snowflake
Snowflake is a cloud data platform company whose products are widely used by enterprises for data warehousing and analytics.
The details
The Coco Bot and Cowork Bot autonomously plan and complete tasks in the background once users set broad goals, operating with the same data access and execution permissions as users and alerting them only for critical decisions or final approvals. The platform automatically connects lightweight AI models for large-scale background tasks with high-performance inference models for complex user queries.
Timeline
November 3, 2026: Snowflake announces AI agent updates at Snowflake Expedition 2026.
2026: Snowflake Expedition is held for the first time, expanded from its BUILD developer conference.
Market Landscape
Snowflake's move extends its developer conference franchise, as Snowflake Expedition expands the BUILD model to reach executives, sales, marketing, and finance teams. The announcement positions the company's agents for use across business functions rather than only among developers.
Employees who use Snowflake's platform could have Coco or Cowork complete background tasks once they set broad goals, with the agents alerting them only for critical decisions or final approvals. Enterprise teams can track AI spending by user, team, department, or agent through the Cost Governance feature.
The takeaway
Teams evaluating AI agents may want to track usage and spending from the start, since the Cortex AI Gateway breaks costs down by user, team, department, or agent. Clear approval thresholds for critical decisions can help keep always-on agents aligned with business goals.
Further reading
Explore more on Remote Work and how AI agents are reshaping everyday job tasks.
Source note: This article includes information reported by 조선일보.
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