Integration enables enterprises to enhance retrieval quality with instruction-following reranking capabilities while maintaining security within their Snowflake environment
SAN FRANCISCO, June 3, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Contextual AI, the Enterprise AI company, today announced at Snowflake’s annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, that its state-of-the-art reranker model will be made available as a first-party model in Cortex Search. This integration will enable joint customers to enhance their retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions with the industry’s most accurate reranking capabilities, all within Snowflake’s performant infrastructure, maintaining data security and allowing payment with Snowflake credits.
“Our reranker’s availability in Cortex AI will make it seamless for enterprises to significantly improve their retrieval quality without the expense and complexity of managing models and infrastructure, all while maintaining the security and governance they expect from Snowflake,” said Douwe Kiela, CEO of Contextual AI.
“As organizations build increasingly sophisticated AI applications, retrieval quality has emerged as a critical differentiator,” said Dwarak Rajagopal, Vice President and Head of AI Engineering at Snowflake. “Contextual AI’s reranker is among the leaders for retrieval quality numbers in the industry and allows customers to steer their results based on business logic. The reranker will allow our joint customers to build high-performance AI systems while keeping their data secure within their Snowflake environment.”
Leading Reranking Capabilities
Contextual AI’s reranker is the first to offer instruction-following capabilities, enabling Snowflake customers to customize how retrieved documents are prioritized according to their business-specific needs. Organizations can provide natural language instructions, such as “Prioritize recent documents” or “Emphasize internal sources,” enabling unprecedented control over retrieval quality and helping to resolve the information conflicts that routinely exist between different documents within enterprises.
The Contextual AI reranker delivers state-of-the-art performance on the industry-leading BEIR benchmark, significantly outperforming competing solutions. Extensive testing on real-world evaluation datasets also confirms superior retrieval quality across diverse domains like finance and technical documentation.
Benefits for Snowflake Customers
The addition of Contextual AI’s reranker to Cortex AI will provide significant advantages to joint customers:
- Improved AI performance:Â Helps Snowflake customers improve their RAG systems with enhanced retrieval accuracy across diverse enterprise domains.
- Seamless integration:Â Available as a model within most Cortex functions, allowing for fast and easy incorporation into existing Snowflake workloads.
- Minimal infrastructure overhead:Â Leverages Snowflake’s powerful GPU infrastructure, eliminating the need for provisioning and managing compute resources, and is included in your Snowflake bill.
The planned integration builds upon the existing strategic partnership between the two companies, which includes Snowflake Ventures’ participation in Contextual AI’s Series A funding. The Contextual AI Platform is also available as a Snowflake Native App in the Snowflake Marketplace. Contextual AI is sponsoring Snowflake Summit 2025 in San Francisco. To meet with the team, contact info@contextual.ai.
About Contextual AI
Contextual AI’s mission is to change the way the world works through AI. The company’s platform empowers enterprises to build specialized RAG agents, and is trusted by Fortune 500 companies, like HSBC and Qualcomm. Learn more: contextual.ai.
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SOURCE Contextual AI