Snowflake Adds OpenAI's GPT 5.5

Snowflake is bringing OpenAI's most advanced model, GPT 5.5, to its Cortex AI platform. This move, announced as a same-day private preview availability for launch partners, integrates GPT 5.5 within Snowflake's secure data perimeter.

GPT 5.5 represents a significant leap in AI capability, particularly excelling at agentic coding, complex task planning, and handling ambiguity. OpenAI states the model can tackle multi-part problems end-to-end without explicit step-by-step instructions.

Accelerated Development with Cortex Code

Developers can leverage GPT 5.5 through Snowflake's Cortex Code agent. This integration allows the AI to understand enterprise data, governance policies, and workflows, speeding up the transition from concept to production. Enhanced reasoning and code generation capabilities are highlighted, enabling more complex, long-running tasks directly within the Snowsight interface, CLI, and developer tools.

The platform transforms natural language into production-ready pipelines and AI agents, collapsing weeks of integration work into minutes while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance.

Building Advanced Enterprise Intelligence Agents

Snowflake Intelligence is positioning itself as a new category of agents designed to foster data-driven cultures. With GPT 5.5, users can ask complex questions in natural language and receive actionable insights, all within a governed environment. For developers, this means building more autonomous agents that can reason across data, write and execute code, and orchestrate workflows.

Precision Analysis Across Data Types

Cortex AI Functions enable scalable AI pipelines using SQL across multimodal enterprise data. These functions offer high-performance processing at a lower cost than manual orchestration, ensuring trusted insights with Snowflake's inherent security and governance. For instance, the AI_COMPLETE function allows analysts to apply natural language prompts directly in SQL with models like GPT 5.5.

Example SQL query:

SELECT AI_COMPLETE( 'openai-gpt-5-5', PROMPT('Review the following financial filing and summarize key revenue trends, margin changes, and any notable risk factors mentioned: {0}', my_table.filing)) FROM my_table

Developer-Friendly AI Application Building

The Cortex REST API allows developers to build agentic enterprise applications within Snowflake's security perimeter. GPT 5.5's adjustable effort levels enable balancing reasoning depth and latency for specific tasks. Developers can utilize the OpenAI SDK by pointing it to their Snowflake Cortex REST API endpoint for seamless integration.

Example Python code snippet:

from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
 api_key="",
 base_url="https://.snowflakecomputing.com/api/v1/openai"
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
 model="openai-gpt-5-5",
 messages=[
 {
 "role": "system",
 "content": "You are a helpful business analyst"
 },
 {
 "role": "user",
 "content": "Sales are down 18% in Q2. We had lower ad spend and reduced campaign performance in APAC. Can you analyze the image below to examine the cause?"
 },
 {
 "type": "image_url",
 "image_url": {
 "url": ""
 }
 }
 ]
)
print(response.choices[0].message)

Moving agentic AI from concept to production is now a strategic imperative, with GPT 5.5 powering agents capable of handling complex, long-running tasks with reduced supervision. This capability is accessible through various entry points, including Cortex Code, Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex AI Functions, and REST APIs, accelerating the adoption of production-ready agentic AI at scale.

Learn more about Cortex Code and Snowflake Intelligence innovations.