Recently, Snowflake unveiled the public preview of Snowflake Cortex Analyst. It is a fully managed service that revolutionizes how you can interact with structured data. Built using the most advanced models from Meta’s Llama and Mistral, Cortex Analyst brings a conversational interface. Cortex Analyst streamlines the development of intuitive, self-serve analytics applications with industry-leading accuracy.

Historically, business users have depended on BI dashboards and reports for data-driven insights. However, the inherent rigidity of these tools often leaves business users waiting on overloaded data analysts for updates or specific answers, sometimes taking days. Cortex Analyst flips the script on this paradigm. It offers a natural language interface with high text-to-SQL accuracy, providing faster and more precise responses to business questions. In this article we discuss how Cortex Analyst works and discuss it’s benefits.

The AI Powerhouse Behind Cortex Analyst

At the heart of Cortex Analyst is an agentic AI setup that leverages large language models (LLMs) to translate natural language queries into SQL with near real-time accuracy. Integrated as a REST API, this service allows seamless deployment across any application. This enables developers to design custom user experiences. All this while maintaining Snowflake’s data security and governance features, including role-based access controls (RBAC) to ensure the protection of valuable data.

Bayer’s Success with Cortex Analyst: Empowering Self-Serve Analytics

Global pharmaceutical leader Bayer is a prime example of how Cortex Analyst delivers value. Bayer had previously relied on dashboards to access its enterprise data, but the lack of flexibility hindered the ability to address new business questions. Using Streamlit in Snowflake as the chat interface and Cortex Analyst as the query-generation engine, Bayer unlocked a new level of self-serve analytics.

Initially, Bayer focused on enabling executives to ask high-value questions like:

“What was the market share of product X in the last month?”

The system has since expanded to support business analysts, and has provided detailed, row-level data for deeper analysis.

RESULT: Faster, more accurate answers to business questions and improved decision-making at all organizational levels.

The Accuracy Challenge in “AI for BI”

While AI-driven business intelligence (BI) solutions have exploded in popularity, most fall short in terms of accuracy. This is particularly the case when you are dealing with complex databases and SQL generation. A Forrester report highlighted that current AI solutions for text-to-SQL conversion have a success rate as low as 20% for multi-table queries, casting doubt on their scalability and reliability.

Snowflake’s Cortex Analyst addresses these challenges with four core principles designed to deliver high accuracy:

1. Capture Semantics: The system uses semantic data models to understand the intent behind user questions, avoiding confusion caused by raw schemas.
2. Contain the Problem Space: By focusing on specific use cases, such as sales or marketing analytics, Cortex Analyst improves SQL-generation accuracy within a defined scope.
3. Reject Unanswerable Queries: Like a smart analyst, Cortex Analyst can reject ambiguous queries and suggest alternatives, maintaining user trust.
4. Evolve with Technology: Cortex Analyst keeps schemas simple to optimize for current AI capabilities, ensuring reliable SQL generation even for complex queries.

RESULT:

Cortex Analyst consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs, with benchmark tests showing ~90% or higher accuracy in customer evaluations.

Simplifying Self-Serve Analytics with Cortex Analyst

Building a reliable, production-grade solution for conversational analytics is often a complex and time-consuming endeavor. Developers face numerous challenges, from model evaluation to architecture maintenance and GPU capacity planning.

Cortex Analyst alleviates these burdens by offering a fully managed service that generates highly accurate text-to-SQL responses. This significantly reduces both time-to-deploy and total cost of ownership (TCO).

Prioritizing Data Security and Governance

One of the biggest challenges that AI presents you is the ability to maintain data privacy and governance at all time. Cortex Analyst maintains a privacy-first foundation, ensuring your data never leaves Snowflake’s governance boundary. SQL queries are generated based on metadata from the semantic model YAML file. Even when you use external LLMs like Azure OpenAI, then only metadata and user queries leave Snowflake’s environment.

With built-in integration of Snowflake’s RBAC policies, Cortex Analyst ensures that generated SQL queries respect all security and governance standards. The benefit of this is that it allows enterprises to confidently explore new AI-driven analytics capabilities without compromising data integrity.

Unlocking New Possibilities for Self-Serve Analytics

Snowflake Cortex Analyst is more than just a step forward in business intelligence. It’s a complete reimagining of how users can engage with data. By enabling natural language queries with high accuracy, Cortex Analyst democratizes analytics by empowering users across the enterprise to access the insights they need in real time.