# Snowflake Adds Business Ontology and Governance Controls for AI Agents

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/47901
Published: 2026-11-03T18:21:19.000Z
Updated: 2026-11-03T18:21:19.000Z
Section: Technology

> The framework will link approved company definitions to underlying data, while expanded Cortex AI Gateway controls cover agent connections, tool calls and spending.

Snowflake announced new tools for grounding enterprise AI agents in company definitions and managing their activity at its Expedition 2026 conference Nov. 3. The features include Business Ontology, which connects approved business concepts to underlying tables and views.

Organizations will be able to approve definitions for business concepts through the framework. Snowflake's CoCo coding agent for data teams and CoWork work agent for knowledge workers will use those concepts when responding. Business Ontology is marked for public preview soon.

“The enterprises that win won't be the ones with the most agents,” said Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake’s executive vice president of product.

The company also expanded Cortex AI Gateway, first announced July 28. The gateway applies policies to agent connections across cloud environments, software frameworks and AI providers. Its controls include authorization for tool calls, activity records and spending limits.

Cortex AI Gateway Tools is in public preview. Cortex Sandboxes, Agent Abuse Detection, Agent Trace Intelligence and Dynamic Model Routing are in private preview. Cortex AI Guardrails is marked for public preview soon. Observability, Cortex Inference and cost governance are generally available.

Separately, CoCo Cloud Agents and CoCo Automations are generally available for recurring data-engineering work, including checking pipeline health and investigating failed jobs. CoCo can propose fixes for engineers to review. Snowflake Pipeline Builder is in public preview.