← Beyond a Reasonable dbt
Snowflake | Cortex Agents & dbt
Opening statement

Beyond a Reasonable dbt

Trustworthy pipelines for AI agents
Executive briefing Managing the Cortex Agent lifecycle as code
The docket

What we'll cover

The shift

Every team wants an AI agent

Conversational agents are becoming the front door to enterprise data. Business users ask questions in plain language and expect a trustworthy answer, without writing SQL or waiting on a report.

The demand is real and accelerating. The question is no longer whether you'll build agents; it's whether you can trust the ones you ship.

The case

But most agents are built by click-ops

The charge

  • Assembled by hand in a UI
  • No version control or history
  • No peer review before production
  • No tests: accuracy is a vibe
  • Dev and prod quietly drift apart

The consequence

  • Wrong answers, no way to diff or roll back
  • One person holds the whole thing
  • Every environment rebuilt by hand
  • Trust erodes on the first bad answer
  • Adoption stalls
The reframe

Treat AI agents like production software

An agent is only as trustworthy as the process behind it. So manage the entire lifecycle as code (the data model, the agent, its tests, and its schedule) natively on Snowflake, with dbt.

Same discipline you already apply to the rest of your data platform: version it, review it, test it, promote it.

The payoff

What "as code" delivers

1

Versioned & reviewed

Every change is in Git, diffed, and approved in a pull request before it reaches users.

2

Measurable trust

Evaluations score the agent against known answers; ship only when it clears the bar.

3

One codebase

The same code targets dev, staging, and prod. No rebuilding by hand per environment.

4

Ship anywhere

Deliver the same governed agent to Snowflake Intelligence, Teams, an API, or MCP.

The evidence

One project builds all of it

Data Sourcesyour tables Semantic Modelbusiness meaning The Agentanswers questions Evaluationthe verdict Shipto your users measure → improve → re-run
One dbt project on Snowflake builds every box, and the loop is where evaluation scores drive the next improvement.
The verdict
≥95%

Trust becomes a number

Before an agent ships, it's scored against a set of known questions and answers. The bar to promote: at least 95% answer correctness. Fall short, fix the right layer, and re-run.

Accuracy stops being a gut feeling and becomes a metric you can track, compare across versions, and hold the line on.

The standing order

From dev to production, governed

The same code promotes from a developer's sandbox to production: no hand-rebuilding, no drift. Automated pipelines build and test on every change; scheduled jobs keep it fresh.

Isolated dev

Each engineer builds in their own space, so nobody overwrites anyone else.

Reviewed promotion

Changes merge through pull requests; CI builds and tests before prod.

Always current

Scheduled rebuilds and evaluations run automatically, with no manual toil.

Closing arguments

Ship it where people already work

💬

Snowflake Intelligence

Ask-your-data experience

👥

Microsoft Teams

In the flow of work

🔌

REST API

Embed in your apps

🧩

MCP

Open agent interop

One governed agent, delivered to every surface your users already live in.

The ruling

The bottom line

Ready to go deeper with your team? The full technical walkthrough lives alongside this deck. Open the technical walkthrough.

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