PDFs with Graphs? Just Ask the Agent: Cross-Analyzing Unstructured and Structured Data on Snowflake Cortex Agent

This is an English translation of the original Japanese article: https://dev.classmethod.jp/articles/snowflake-multi-modal-analytics-with-cortex-agent/ Note: Since this is a translated article, some images contain Japanese text. Previously, analyzing unstructured data on Snowflake required Cortex Search, which meant parsing text and loading it into tables — making it difficult to work with PDFs containing graphs and charts. However, now that the AI_COMPLETE function can directly query PDF files on stages, you can pass entire PDFs to an LLM without text extraction or chunk splitting. https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/snowflake-cortex/ai-complete-document-intelligence This means we can wrap AI_COMPLETE in a stored procedure as a PDF custom tool and combine it with Cortex Analyst (Semantic View) to enable natural language analysis across both "unstructured data like PDFs on stages" and "table data" — all within a single Cortex Agent. I decided to put this to the test. The idea for