Snowflake Cortex Analyst for Conversational BI

With every business now depending on data-driven decision-making, organizations have invested heavily in building robust data infrastructure. However, access to data alone doesn't guarantee insights. A McKinsey report found that less than 30% of employees can easily access and use their organization's data to make decisions. While organizations have invested heavily in data infrastructure, the ability to interpret and act on that data hasn't kept pace, making it crucial to ensure that insights are available, accessible, and actionable for non-technical users.

The demand for intuitive, conversational business intelligence (BI) has skyrocketed as Generative AI increasingly integrates into business operations. This shift directly influences the push for conversational BI, as non-technical users want to query and understand data as naturally as they would ask a colleague without needing to learn SQL or navigate complex dashboards.

The Challenge: Custom Chatbots for Data Access are Hard to Scale

Traditionally, building a chatbot to translate human queries into SQL required a multi-step, resource-heavy process:

• Frontend: Developed with React.js or Angular.js for the user interface.
• Backend: Python with Flask or FastAPI for Natural Language Processing and database interactions.
• Database: SQL-based databases to store the data (Snowflake, Postgres, etc.)
• NLP Libraries: Integration with OpenAI or Hugging Face Transformers.

Such setups are expensive to maintain, difficult to secure, and require ongoing tuning of NLP models and SQL generation logic. This means that only large enterprises with dedicated data teams can afford to build and manage such solutions. Snowflake Cortex Analyst delivers a fully managed alternative, offering enterprises a no-code, conversational interface that lets business users derive insights using natural language while leveraging the full power of Snowflake’s data platform.

What is Snowflake Cortex Analyst?

Cortex Analyst, part of the Snowflake Cortex AI/ML suite, is a fully managed, agent-based conversational interface that lets users ask questions in natural language and instantly receive accurate, optimized SQL queries and results.

While custom pipelines have long been favored for their flexibility and tailored capabilities, they come with significant trade-offs, including high development costs, long implementation timelines, and ongoing maintenance overhead. These solutions often require close collaboration between data engineers, analysts, and business users, which can slow down the decision-making process.

Instead of relying on these resource-intensive setups, Cortex Analyst offers a scalable, fully managed alternative that enables enterprises to:

• Rapidly deploy natural language query interfaces
• Maintain governance and data security within Snowflake
• Empower non-technical users to derive insights independently.

It supports visualization formats like bar and line charts, helping users get results and visually understand trends and patterns. By simplifying the process, Cortex Analyst provides a fully managed, sophisticated agentic AI system that handles these complexities, generating highly accurate text-to-SQL responses.

Cortex Analyst Architecture - How it Works:

Diagram 1: Cortex Analyst Architecture

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the Cortex Analyst workflow:

1. User Query Submission: A business user asks a question in plain English through a frontend application (e.g., built on Streamlit).
2. REST API Processing: The question and corresponding semantic model are passed to the Cortex Analyst REST API.
3. Intent Analysis & Context Enrichment: NLP agents identify the user's intent and enrich the context using metadata and schema info.
4. Query Generation & Optimization: Synthesizer agents generate accurate SQL, perform error handling, and suggest alternatives if needed.
5. Execution & Results: The query is executed on Snowflake’s data warehouse, and results are returned to the user in tabular or visual formats.

Some of the key features that set Cortex apart:

Diagram 2: Key features that set Cortex apart

1. Built-in Security and Governance

Cortex Analyst does not train on customer data and operates within Snowflake’s governance boundaries. It is also seamlessly integrated with Snowflake’s role-based access control (RBAC).

2. Best-in-Class LLMs

• Leverages the latest Meta Llama, Mistral, and OpenAI GPT models.
• Dynamically selects the optimal or combination of models at runtime to maximize accuracy and performance. At runtime, it selects the best combination of models to ensure the highest accuracy and performance for each query.

3. Semantic Model for High Precision and Accuracy

• Semantic models are defined in a lightweight YAML file
• Captures metadata, relationships, and schema semantics to understand the context better.

4. REST API for Integration

Easy to embed into existing tools with its API-first approach for end-user experience. The RESTful endpoints support seamless interoperability with internal dashboards

5. Self-Serve Analytics via Natural Language Queries

The interface supports natural language queries, suggests alternatives, and handles ambiguous or complex questions.

6. Suggest Alternatives for Unanswered Questions

Given the available data, the snowflake cortex rejects ambiguous or unanswerable questions and suggests alternative queries that can be answered.

Walkthrough of Setting up a Basic POC

To implement a Proof of Concept (POC) for Cortex Analyst, ensure the following:

• Active Snowflake account
• Relevant data in Snowflake tables
• Setup of the semantic model YAML
• Required permissions and roles as per Snowflake documentation
• Pre-configured environment and frontend interface (e.g., Streamlit)

The Future of BI is Conversational, Contextual, and Instant

Snowflake Cortex Analyst redefines how organizations consume data. Merging the power of LLMs with a secure, governed architecture allows business users to interact with data in real-time without needing to know SQL or wait for dashboards.

As organizations aim to democratize insights across every team, tools like Cortex Analyst will play a pivotal role in making BI more inclusive, faster, and more accurate.

Accelerate your journey toward conversational BI by partnering with the Tech Mahindra Snowflake Team to launch your Cortex Analyst proof‑of‑concept and empower your users with self-service, real-time insights.