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The AI model itself is no longer the differentiator it once was. Enterprises increasingly have access to the same powerful foundation models. What will separate the leaders is something far more valuable: the context of their business. Customer relationships. Transactions. Product usage. Conversations. Documents. Business definitions. Institutional knowledge. This context is unique to every company—and it is what allows AI to move from generating answers to understanding a business and acting on its behalf. The challenge is that the enterprise context doesn’t live in one place. It spans Salesforce, data platforms like Snowflake, applications, documents, conversations, and countless other systems. This is why we built Data 360. And with our Zero Copy partnership with Snowflake, we enable organizations to seamlessly connect and harness their enterprise context wherever it resides.
From Enterprise Data to Enterprise Context
At Dreamforce, we showed how Data 360 working with Snowflake as a Zero Copy partner can turn distributed enterprise data into trusted context for humans and AI agents—without forcing customers to abandon the platforms where their data already lives. We advanced Data 360 as the context engine for the agentic enterprise while expanding what Salesforce and Snowflake customers can do together. From Enterprise Data to Enterprise Context, data alone isn’t enough for AI. An agent needs to understand what the data means, how different pieces of information relate to each other, what it should remember, what it is allowed to access, and what actions it can safely take. Think about the progression as data → semantics → context → action. That’s the evolution Data 360 and Snowflake as a key zero copy partner are both driving toward.
At the center of Data 360 is Agent Context Engine (ACE), which brings together structured data, unstructured content, knowledge graphs, and agent memory into a unified context layer. ACE gives agents real-time context in a structure they need to reason more effectively across channels and LLM providers, while helping improve grounding, governance, latency, and efficiency. And with bidirectional Zero Copy access to Snowflake, that context can incorporate governed enterprise data where it already lives—without creating another copy.
Data 360 is also extending that trusted context to more use cases, applications, and agents:
- The #1 Agentic Customer Data Platform (CDP) brings agents across all of Data 360 including goal-based segmentation to Data 360, evolving the CDP from a system that organizes customer data into one that helps businesses put that data to work. By turning unified customer data into trusted, actionable context, Data 360 helps teams move from business goals to precise audiences and activation across channels.
- Data 360 Headless extends trusted context beyond Salesforce applications, enabling developers to bring customer data and shared semantic definitions into custom applications, external tools, and third-party agents through open standards including Model Context Protocol (MCP), APIs, and skills.
Context requires data. For customers with data in Snowflake, the new v2 Zero Copy connector removes the last major friction in how joint customers share data. Teams building AI solutions on Snowflake with Cortex AI now have fresh Salesforce data in Snowflake without ETL pipelines. Data 360 objects now appear as native Iceberg-backed tables inside a customer’s Snowflake account — query-able with standard SQL, compatible with Streams and Dynamic Tables for near real-time CDC pipelines, and AI-ready out of the box.
Together, these advancements create a powerful progression: connect enterprise data, give it shared meaning, turn it into trusted context, and make that context available wherever humans and agents need to act.
Unlocking Trapped Data by Breaking Down Data Boundaries
Salesforce and Snowflake have steadily broken down the boundaries between customer data and enterprise data. As our first Zero Copy partner, the partnership has been built on principles that we’ve shared for years: customers shouldn’t have to choose between openness and intelligence—or move their data simply to make it useful to AI.
Enterprise AI cannot reach its potential when data is trapped in silos or when companies have to build another copy of their data estate just to make it useful to AI. That’s why Zero Copy has been such an important foundation of our partnership. Instead of moving massive datasets between platforms through traditional ETL pipelines, Salesforce Data 360 can securely access Snowflake data where it already resides. Customers can preserve their investments, governance, and architecture while making that data available to power customer and employee experiences, analytics, and AI.
At Dreamforce, we were also proud to recognize Snowflake as our 2026 System of Context Partner of the Year. The results speak for themselves: more than 1,000 joint customers are running workloads across platforms with native Zero Copy, with 71 trillion rows connected —more than 4× year-over-year growth.
Now we’re extending that foundation across the architecture required for the agentic enterprise.
“Without governed context and business semantics, agents risk producing confident answers built on incorrect assumptions and inconsistent definitions. In collaboration with Salesforce, we’re solving this critical bottleneck in enterprise AI by tightly grounding agents in trusted data where it already lives.”
– Saptarshi Mukherjee, Senior Director, Product Management
Taking Zero Copy Further
Zero Copy began by eliminating unnecessary data movement. Now we’re extending that architecture across open table formats, clouds, governance, and AI to provide a governed context foundation for customers.
- Zero Copy Data Sharing v2 Connector makes Data 360 objects available as native Apache Iceberg tables, allowing teams to use Snowflake Dynamic Tables and scheduled tasks to capture changes and work with fresh customer data without maintaining another pipeline. OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication helps secure access.
- Expanded Zero Copy with Horizon Catalog enables direct file federation with Snowflake-managed Apache Iceberg tables. Data 360 can query that governed data and use it to ground AI experiences without moving the underlying information.
- Data 360 Private Connect Multicloud for Snowflake on Azure allows organizations to privately connect Data 360 running on AWS with Snowflake on Azure without traffic traversing the public internet—particularly important for customers operating in highly regulated environments.
- And through Horizon Catalog integration, we’re bringing governance and metadata closer together across the two platforms so customers can maintain consistent policies as their data is used across analytics, applications, and AI.
“Bidirectional zero copy integration felt like a 1,000× step forward versus our old setup, transforming how we serve musicians across Guitar Center. Building on that foundation, these new integrations should help bring trusted enterprise context directly into our AI agents and customer workflows.”
— Mike Doll, VP of Data, Guitar Center
“With zero copy integration, we built a live, connected data layer that powers everything from demand routing and audience activation to our internal AI platform. As we scale our agentic workflows using Salesforce MCP and Snowflake, we are excited to see these two platforms grow closer together.”
— Ranjith Ramesh, Sr. Engineering Manager, GTM Intelligence, Indeed
Bridging Enterprise Data and AI
Connecting data is only the first step. In an agentic enterprise, context also needs to move securely across agents, applications, and the flow of work—and retain consistent meaning wherever it goes.
- Open protocols: New data management MCP servers and cross-platform integrations will enable Snowflake and Salesforce agents to securely reach shared enterprise context and execute governed workflows with full auditability and control.
- Common semantics: Tableau will natively consume semantic views authored in Snowflake, allowing organizations to define business metrics once and reuse it consistently across dashboards, Cortex queries, and Agentforce workflows.
Together, these capabilities create something increasingly important for enterprise AI: a common, governed understanding of the business that can travel across platforms. This is the next frontier for enterprise AI: not simply connecting more data, but giving every human and every agent a trusted, governed understanding of the business—and the ability to act on it.
Next Steps & Availability
Ready to see how Salesforce Data 360 and Snowflake can power your agentic transformation?
- Watch the Data 360 Keynote from Dreamforce 2026
- Watch the On-demand Webinar: Ramp up fast on the partnership, see a demo, and hear from Indeed how they’re leveraging Zero Copy. Register here.
- Explore Data 360: Learn how Zero Copy can bring your enterprise data into the era of agentic work at Salesforce.com/data.
Feature Availability
- Generally Available Today: Zero Copy Data Sharing v2 Connector and Data 360 Private Connect Multicloud for Snowflake on Azure.
- Public Preview: Expanded Zero Copy with Horizon Catalog and Snowflake Cortex Agents
- Private Preview / Future Roadmap: Salesforce and Informatica MCP servers in Snowflake Cortex (Preview); Tableau semantic views for Snowflake planned for GA in early 2027.
