Snowflake's biggest user conference yet kicked off June 1 in San Francisco, and the company arrived with a full slate of product announcements aimed squarely at builders. Here's what matters most if you're writing code, managing data infrastructure, or designing systems on Snowflake.
First, Two New Names
Before getting into the announcements, note two product rebranding moves. Cortex Code is now officially Snowflake Coco. The informal name had already taken hold with customers, so Snowflake made it official. Snowflake Intelligence is now Snowflake Cowork — a rename that reflects how the product has grown from a next-gen BI tool into a broader productivity platform for knowledge workers.
Coco Gets a Lot More Surface Area
The biggest news for developers is how many places Coco now lives. Snowflake is introducing a VS Code extension, an Excel plugin, Slack integration, and a standalone Coco Desktop app. Claude Code support is also on the list — useful for any team already using Anthropic's CLI in their workflow.
On the capability side, Coco can now handle long-running autonomous tasks via Cloud Agents, create reusable workflows through Skills, and support automations for recurring monitoring and validation tasks. New integrations with Retool, Superblocks, and Vercel let developers turn a prompt into a deployed app on Snowflake's App Runtime.
Bala Kasiviswanathan, Snowflake's VP of Developer and AI Experiences, framed the shift this way: "A year ago, building on enterprise data meant writing code, managing infrastructure, and stitching together disconnected tools for orchestration, streaming, governance, and deployment. Today, Snowflake CoCo is collapsing that complexity into a single AI-native development experience."
CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy added that Coco can already outperform frontier models on operations within Snowflake, and that partners are shifting from time-and-material billing to outcome-based engagements because of it.
The customer numbers are concrete. Fanatics reduced pipeline troubleshooting from days to hours. Thomson Reuters modernized legacy systems and delivered insights in days instead of weeks across more than 37,500 governed tables.
Coco also works across data sources beyond Snowflake — including AWS Glue, dbt, Apache Airflow, Databricks, and Postgres.
Snowflake Datastream: Managed Streaming, Built In
For data engineers managing streaming infrastructure, Snowflake introduced Datastream — a fully managed, Kafka wire protocol compatible streaming service built natively into the platform. Existing Kafka clients and applications can point to it without rewriting integrations. Under the hood, it's pure Snowflake technology, not a Kafka wrapper.
The practical appeal: streaming data routes directly into Snowflake tables with low latency, and it automatically inherits existing governance, access controls, masking policies, and lineage. No separate broker to manage. Datastream enters private preview shortly after Summit.
Apache Iceberg v3 Goes GA — and Open Data Gets Serious
Snowflake announced several moves on the open data front. Apache Iceberg v3 support is now generally available, with the broadest feature set on the market — expanded data types, cross-system change tracking, and improved semi-structured data performance.
Snowflake Storage for Apache Iceberg Tables is also GA, with bi-directional read/write access to Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables from external engines via Horizon Catalog, powered by Apache Polaris. The Iceberg REST Scan Plan API ensures security and masking policies travel with data even when accessed by external tools.
Zero-copy integrations for SAP, Salesforce, and Workday mean direct access to that data without replication. The architectural goal: work on a single, governed copy of data wherever it lives, without moving it.
Two new context layers sit on top of all of this. Horizon Context brings in explicit, customer-defined metadata — including from the Select Star acquisition, which ingests metadata from Postgres, SQL Server, Tableau, and Power BI. Cortex Sense builds implicit context automatically from usage patterns, feeding both Coco and Cowork without requiring manual configuration.
Natoma Acquisition: Governing What Agents Actually Do
This is the announcement that architects should pay the most attention to. Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Natoma, an enterprise Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform. The significance: Natoma extends governance beyond data access to cover AI agent actions — sending emails, summarizing Slack threads, updating Jira tickets, checking calendars — all from within Snowflake's governed environment with policy enforcement and full audit trails.
For anyone designing agentic systems, this signals where Snowflake is heading. The goal is to be the control plane not just for what data agents can see, but for what they can do across enterprise systems.
AI Security: Three New Layers
Four security announcements are worth noting for teams building agentic workloads:
Agent Identity gives every agent a verified identity with role-based permissions and a full audit trail. Prompt Injection Protection uses ML-driven detection to block jailbreak attempts. The Trust Center is getting an AI security package with codified best practices for agent configuration, credential usage, and data access. And multi-party authorization requires a second approver for sensitive operations — protecting against both insider threats and runaway agents.
A Few More Things Worth Noting
Snowflake Apps now supports native React development alongside AI-powered workflows, moving from prompt to a production-ready app deployed inside the security perimeter.
Adaptive Compute goes GA at Summit. It automatically determines the right mix of compute resources in real time — no manual warehouse sizing — with reported gains of up to 3.5x over first-generation warehouses.
Cowork is adding automations, background agents, and a next-generation artifacts and dashboards layer. For architects: Cowork is the governed, managed experience for everyone in the organization. Coco is the power tool for technical users who know what they're doing.
