At Workday Rising in San Francisco, Snowflake and Workday proudly announced a groundbreaking zero-copy, bidirectional partnership. This collaboration aims to accelerate AI innovation and enhance business agility for our shared customers by enabling secure, seamless data sharing and agent interoperability between Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud and Workday’s enterprise data platforms. At the heart of this partnership is Workday Data Cloud, a new suite of products and capabilities designed to open up the Workday platform and transform how customers access and utilize their most critical people and money data. 

As highlighted by Snowflake’s CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, and Workday’s President of Product and Technology, Gerrit Kazmaier, customers have long asked for easier ways to share data between platforms and facilitate collaboration among their AI agents. This partnership addresses these needs, helping customers solve the challenges of fragmented data silos, costly data movement and the difficulty of achieving unified insights. 

For the first time, our Snowflake customers can directly access modeled, semantically enriched Workday data covering employees, business workflows and financials within Snowflake, without the need for complex data copying or movement. Workday defines the specific data objects to be shared and automatically creates externally managed Apache Iceberg™ tables in Snowflake, which reference Parquet files stored securely in Workday Data Cloud. The data then appears as a native inbound share within Snowflake, allowing teams to run queries seamlessly across both Snowflake tables and shared Workday data. This zero-copy integration allows AI agents on both platforms to interoperate, combine data and generate real-time insights, all while removing the need for costly and complex data pipelines. 

This announcement delivers:

• Accelerated AI and analytics: A unified, high-quality data foundation allows data scientists and AI developers to build their next-generation advanced analytics, AI-driven applications and AI agents faster and at scale. This includes agentic AI integration, where Snowflake Cortex AI and Workday agents seamlessly collaborate in a continuous events-to-insights-to-action loop, enabling organizations to detect business opportunities and risks and automatically trigger corrective actions and processes across both platforms.

• Secure zero-copy sharing: A customer’s richly modeled Workday data never leaves its secure environment and instead is directly accessible in Snowflake, minimizing any data sprawl, enabling robust governance and simplifying compliance. 

• Reduced cost and complexity: The need for custom data pipelines and expensive third-party extract, transform, load (ETL) or extract, load, transform (ELT) tools is removed by providing a direct, zero-copy connection between Snowflake and Workday.

• Faster insights, smarter decisions: Combining Workday’s rich financial and personnel data with enterprise data in Snowflake gives customers a comprehensive and real-time view of their business, enhancing their ability to make critical business decisions with higher accuracy and flexibility.

“Customers have long struggled with fragmented data silos and the complex, costly movement required to gain unified insights from their critical people and money data,” says Ray Chan, Vice President of Software Development Engineering at Workday. “Our partnership with Snowflake changes that equation, offering a zero-copy, bidirectional connection for secure, seamless data sharing, enhanced data governance and agent interoperability to accelerate AI innovation.”

Take, for example, a customer looking to predict financial trends and accelerate operations by shortening close cycles. With this partnership, Workday provides core, real-time financial data. Snowflake then helps unify this data with all other business and operational data, offering faster and more automated analysis to support advanced analytics and operations. By combining core finance tasks with critical information, such as customer satisfaction scores, product usage data or supply chain costs, businesses can predict future trends to make actionable decisions. In addition to AI-automated reconciliation in Workday, advanced analytics and machine learning in Snowflake can be used to build models that automatically detect unusual fluctuations and provide real-time visibility into the financial close process. This transforms the finance function from a historical reporting role to a proactive and strategic business partner.

This represents a major milestone in the evolution of enterprise AI. By fusing trusted and semantically enriched Workday data with Snowflake’s scalable Data Cloud and AI ecosystem capabilities, our customers get a unified data environment that empowers collaborative AI agents and workflows like never before. We are excited to partner with Workday to build an open, secure and AI-ready enterprise data ecosystem. Together, we are expanding our joint customers’ ability to break down data silos, accelerate innovation and unlock unprecedented value from their AI investments. 

The path forward

Interested in learning more about this partnership? 

• Existing Snowflake customers: Contact your Snowflake account team for more information.

• New customers: Contact our sales team to get support.

We are excited to continue building the future of enterprise AI with Workday and our other partners. Our goal is to help organizations worldwide transform their business insights into action through seamless, secure and intelligent data collaboration. We look forward to embarking on this data journey with you.

Forward-looking statements

This article contains forward-looking statements, including about our future product offerings, which are not commitments to deliver any product offerings. Actual results and offerings may differ and are subject to known and unknown risk and uncertainties. See our latest 10-Q for more information.