Snowflake Cortex Agents Plug-in with HCL Universal Orchestrator

To get started, let's explore what Snowflake Cortex Agents are and how the new plug-in brings their power to HCL Automation Orchestration users.
Modern business automation is increasingly driven by generative AI, which excels at handling complex, multistep tasks. Snowflake Cortex Agents, created within the Snowflake framework, can connect to your company's systems, APIs, and data sources to effectively fulfill user requests. With the Snowflake Cortex Agents Plug-in for HCL Universal Orchestrator, downloadable from Automation Hub, you can seamlessly integrate the power of these agents directly into your automation workflows, enabling truly intelligent and responsive business processes.

Core Capabilities of the Snowflake Cortex Agents Plug-in
This plug-in is designed to elevate your AI-driven automation projects with several powerful capabilities:

1. Prompt-Driven Automation: Instead of needing specific parameters for each step, this plug-in initiates the most efficient set of actions based on a simple natural language prompt.
2. Secure Credential Management: You can securely store and manage Snowflake credentials using an RSA key pair, which ensures safe, passwordless access to your cloud environment.​
3. Unified Data Orchestration: Cortex Agents are built to analyze both structured and unstructured data, delivering comprehensive insights from a single interaction.
4. Intelligent Reflection and Iteration: Agents assess results to determine the best next steps. This reflective process allows them to request clarification, iterate on a task, or provide a final answer, ensuring accuracy when handling complex data queries.
5. ​​Robust Error Handling: The plug-in delivers clear, actionable error messages for failed tasks or connection issues, simplifying troubleshooting.

Common Applications and Use Cases
Integrating Cortex Agents into your workflows opens the door to numerous innovative automation scenarios. Some of the most common applications are:

1. Smarter Marketing Automation: Build workflows that automatically analyze customer reviews and social media. If negative trends are detected, the system can autonomously pause campaigns and notify the appropriate teams.
2. Enhanced Automated Customer Support: By analyzing support tickets and knowledge bases, Cortex Agents can generate intelligent summaries and suggest solutions to update self-service portals or give agents immediate guidance.
3. Proactive Sales Engagement: Leverage Cortex Agents to analyze sales activity and external data on key accounts. The system can identify positive developments and trigger automated follow-ups for sales teams, complete with AI-generated talking points.
4. Compliance and Risk Assessment Automation: Schedule regular reviews of compliance documents against operational data to proactively identify potential risks and maintain adherence to regulations.

Example Workflow: Automating Compliance and Risk AssessmentConsider a typical business challenge: running monthly compliance checks to monitor regulatory changes and mitigate risks. With the Snowflake Cortex Agents Plug-in, HCL Universal Orchestrator can trigger a Cortex Agent to search for new regulatory documents, compare them against recent operational data, and use an LLM to summarize key changes and potential risks. The final report is then automatically distributed to compliance teams, logged in an audit trail, and can even trigger a workflow to schedule mandatory training if significant policy changes are found. This automation streamlines compliance operations, reduces manual effort, and improves reliability.

Getting Started with the Plug-in
Ready to begin? Setting up the Snowflake Cortex Agents Plug-in is straightforward. Just follow these steps:
1. Connect to Snowflake

• Navigate to the Workload Designer in your orchestration console.
• Create a new task and choose the Snowflake Cortex Agents plug-in.
• In the Connection tab, provide your credentials:

1. Account URL: Your unique Snowflake account web address.
2. Account Identifier: The identifier for your Snowflake account.
3. Username: The username for your Snowflake account.
4. RSA Private Key: Your private key in PEM/PKCS #8 format for secure authentication.
5. Passphrase (Optional): A secret string to encrypt your locally stored private key.

     6. Use the Test Connection button to verify connection.

2. Define the Action

• In the Action tab, give the agent a natural language User Prompt that outlines your objective.
  
• Specify the LLM Model the agent should access.
  
• Optionally, add Tools like Analyst (for structured data) or Search (for unstructured data) to receive more detailed responses.
  

3. Save and Run Your Task

• Save the task definition and add it to a workflow to automate your business process.
• Submit the task to run in the current plan.

4. Monitor Task Execution

• You can track the task progress in the Monitoring View.
• Review detailed logs which include the agent's conversation, tools used, any generated SQL, and the final results.​

Why Choose the Snowflake Cortex Agents Plug-in?By integrating the Snowflake Cortex Agents Plug-in, your organization can build dynamic, AI-powered automation that is both event-driven and schedulable. This allows you to proactively gain insights, enrich processes, improve customer experiences, and mitigate risks—all within a deterministic and orchestrated framework. Whether you're automating compliance checks, enhancing customer support, or creating smarter marketing campaigns, this plug-in helps you move beyond simple automation to create truly intelligent and responsive business processes.

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Ernesto Carrabba, Product Manager, HCL Clara, HCL HERO and HCL Workload Automation 
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Ernesto Carrabba is the Product Manager for HCL Clara, HCL HERO and HCL Workload Automation. Ernesto is a very dynamic product manager with experience in building and launching IoT products, combined with a master's degree in mechanical engineering and study researches on Augmented and Virtual Reality.

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