Snowflake CoCo: Built to Scale Enterprise AI with Trust

Snowflake CoCo: Built to Scale Enterprise AI with Trust

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JUL 21, 2026 / 8 min read AI & ML Snowflake CoCo: Built to Scale Enterprise AI with Trust

Arun Agarwal +6

AI is evolving from an individual productivity tool into an enterprise platform, and the opportunity ahead is enormous. But scaling AI across an organization raises challenges that individual AI tools were never designed to solve.

Finance teams need visibility into AI spending before it becomes a budget surprise. Platform teams need confidence that AI operates within existing governance policies. Developers need AI agents that work with their existing tools and workflows. Together, these raise questions of trust, governance and cost.

Today's Snowflake CoCo announcements are built around that reality. For builders, CoCo Desktop is now generally available on macOS and Windows, and Cloud Agents brings the full power of CoCo to Snowsight without a local install. For platform teams and admins, new AI cost governance capabilities give real-time visibility into AI spending with per-user controls to manage it and Agent Settings lets admins configure the CoCo experience once and roll it out across their teams. And for wherever work happens, CoCo Mobile (iOS and Android) is now in private preview, extending trusted AI into devices your teams already use.

Together, these announcements make it easier to govern AI costs, ground AI in your enterprise context and bring trusted AI into the places where work already happens.

Available today with Snowflake CoCo:

AI cost governance (per-user quotas and quota enforcements) : Now in public preview

Agent Settings, including default model picker : Now in public preview

CoCo Desktop : Generally available today for macOS and Windows

Cloud Agents : Generally available today in Snowsight, public preview soon via the Cortex Agents REST API

CoCo Mobile app for Android and iOS : Now in private preview

Skills and Plugins Sharing : Public preview soon

Governing AI begins with knowing what it costs

Every major technology platform reaches a point where governance becomes as important as innovation, and AI is now at that stage. As organizations scale AI adoption, they need visibility into AI usage, predictable costs, and the right guardrails to enable innovation without financial surprises. That's why AI cost governance has become foundational to enterprise AI.

That's why AI cost governance is foundational to CoCo rather than an administrative feature added after deployment. The same role-based access controls that already govern your Snowflake environment govern CoCo, no new security model to configure, no parallel identity layer to manage. From there, our approach extends that foundation with three principles that mirror how organizations already manage every other strategic technology investment.

Visibility: Administrators need to understand how AI is being used across users, teams and workloads while adoption is happening, not weeks later when invoices arrive.

Optimization: By using Snowflake's native tagging framework , organizations can attribute AI consumption to teams, cost centers, or business units, making chargeback and showback significantly more straightforward, while new default model settings help balance capability and cost without requiring every individual developer to make those decisions manually.

Control: Per-user quotas and automated notifications, both new capabilities launching with this release, allow administrators to establish guardrails before costs become surprises, so developers continue building freely while platform and finance teams gain confidence that adoption remains predictable as it scales.

Fig 1: Preventing budget surprises by setting up CoCo per-user quotas in Snowsight

More done per dollar, same high quality bar. On Snowflake's own heavy internal CoCo CLI usage, we recently cut cost per prompt by ~28% for the same model on the same tasks, with no quality degradation. These gains come from a series of efficiency improvements: Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL) based tool calling, more compact (or even offloaded) bash and SQL tool output to keep context lean, loading skills and less-common tools only when they're needed, lighter-weight subagents, and smarter model routing in general. Across customer CoCo usage we're seeing the same directional shift - average cost per prompt is down ~20% in recent weeks, thanks to these efficiency improvements being rolled out. We're always investing in token efficiency and faster task completion with a high quality bar so enterprises can scale CoCo without linearly scaling costs. (Details of this set of cost efficiency engineering will be shared in a followup engineering post.)

AI usage for organizations now can be on the same foundation of trust and governance that they have built with Snowflake. Agent Settings (now in Public Preview) extends that governance framework directly to the developer experience. Admins can create a single configuration and roll it out across their users. For this release, we are supporting default models, which is a top request to help admins choose the best model that they want to use across their users. Going forward, this will be the way to support preinstalled skills and other tools their teams use, and apply it across every user without requiring any individual setup. Because Agent Settings is backed by the same role-based access controls that govern the rest of your Snowflake environment, different teams can get different configurations based on their roles.

Enterprise AI should work wherever your teams work

Building on the strong reception of CoCo in CLI and Snowsight, today we're delivering on one of the most requested customer asks: a native desktop experience. CoCo Desktop, now generally available for macOS and Windows, is Snowflake's most complete AI development environment. As a native desktop application, it gives developers a dedicated workspace with integrated access to local files, repositories, terminals, and Snowflake, all grounded in deep, native awareness of their Snowflake environment. With built-in agentic browser and notebook experiences, CoCo Desktop is purpose-built for modern data development. Unlike general-purpose AI coding tools, it comes with your Snowflake environment already loaded, no cold starts, no re-explaining your data model, no governance gaps.

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