What's new in Posit Team for Snowflake: May 2026

Posit Assistant Joins Positron within Snowflake

Posit Assistant is an AI agent for data science built into Positron on the Posit Team Native App for Snowflake. It connects directly to your session context (your data, environment, and active work) so data scientists can analyze, model, and build without leaving their IDE or Snowflake data perimeter.

Unlike general-purpose coding assistants, Posit Assistant understands your full session context: your data, your Snowflake environment, and the work in progress. Ask it to clean a dataset, explore patterns, train a model, or build an app without switching tools or losing context.

Posit Assistant is currently in preview. To try it out, you will need to enable both Positron Assistant and Posit Assistant in your settings. Full setup instructions are available in the Posit Assistant guide. Posit Assistant will supersede both Positron Assistant and the Databot extension later in 2026, with a goal of reaching general availability by end of year. Explore Posit Assistant.

Interactive and governed insights with Posit Assistant and Snowflake Cortex

Data scientists want to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to accelerate their productivity, but security teams need to ensure data privacy. This Posit Team update addresses this by integrating directly with Snowflake Cortex LLMs.

Posit Assistant uses Snowflake Cortex as its LLM backend through zero-configuration integration with your managed credentials. This means no API key management for users, and all AI interactions stay entirely within the secure Snowflake ecosystem, following Snowflake’s governance guardrails. No external training or unauthorized use of your data occurs. Although Cortex works out of the box, Posit customers can set up additional preferred LLM providers through the Posit Assistant settings, and link them there. Refer to the Posit Assistant guide for provider configuration details.

Smarter, Faster Exploratory Data Analysis on Snowflake

Posit has also added a Snowflake skill to Posit Assistant, which allows customers to:

• Connect easily: Connect to Snowflake databases easily using natural language (e.g., “connect to Snowflake”)
   
• Use Cortex models out of the box: Seamlessly interact with the secure LLMs already provisioned to your environment.
   
• Analyze with semantic awareness: Upon invoking and pointing to a database, Posit Assistant agentically discovers your schemas, tables, views and any semantic models, building a complete picture of your data. This gives the agent the right context to analyze complex questions that are specific to your organization (e.g., accurately calculating “leakage ratios”).

Optimize compute costs with smarter idle management

Posit Workbench (within the Posit Team native app) now gives administrators new ways to help ensure you only pay for the compute you actually use. With configurable session timeouts, idle sessions are automatically suspended or terminated before they become “zombie” sessions running overnight or through the weekend, consuming compute credits without doing any work. For organizations running Workbench on cloud infrastructure, this can translate to meaningful savings.

• Administrators can now configure a Workbench session timeout from the Manage page. Idle sessions are automatically ended after the specified number of hours (set to 0 to disable). RStudio sessions suspend to disk so users can resume where they left off; VS Code, Positron, and Jupyter sessions are terminated.
   
• Faster auto-suspend: when auto-suspend is enabled, Posit Team now suspends Workbench after just 15 minutes of no active sessions (previously one hour), provided the service has been running for at least an hour.
   
• Auto Save on by default: VS Code and Positron sessions in Workbench now have Auto Save enabled by default, reducing the risk of losing unsaved work when a session is terminated

Example configuration: Set a 2-hour session timeout with auto-suspend enabled. Workbench sessions end after two hours of inactivity, and the Workbench service then suspends ~15 minutes later, after which compute costs stop until a user returns to Workbench. Learn more here.

User documentation:

• RStudio session timeout
   
• Positron session timeout
   
• VS Code session timeout

Administrator documentation:

• RStudio workspace management
   
• Positron idle session timeout
   
• VS Code idle session timeout

Posit Connected Apps now available on Snowflake Marketplace

The Snowflake Marketplace now features Posit Workbench, Posit Connect, Package Manager as connected apps! Unlike the Posit Team Native App, which runs within Snowpark Container Services (SPCS), these connected app listings are for customers who prefer a self-hosted and self-managed version of Posit Workbench, Posit Connect, and Posit Package Manager. Snowflake customers can use their existing Snowflake credits (MCD) for these connected apps in addition to the native app.

View on Snowflake Marketplace:

• Posit Workbench (Connected App)
   
• Posit Connect (Connected App)
   
• Posit Package Manager (Connected App)

Get started today

Together, Posit and Snowflake bring AI-powered data science where your data lives. Manage your entire data science lifecycle inside the secure, governed Snowflake AI Data Cloud with Posit Team, through the Connected App or Posit Team Native App.

• Meet us at Snowflake Summit! Learn more about the Posit and see live demos at our booth (#2804), June 1–4, at Moscone Center in San Francisco.
   
• Posit + Snowflake partnership page for an overview of integration capabilities
   
• Curious about Posit Team, but not ready to commit? Start a 30-day free trial of the Posit Team Native App immediately — no sales calls required.
   
• See how our joint customers like Pinterest are winning with Posit and Snowflake
   
• Schedule a demo with a Posit expert to see the Native App in action with your specific use cases

About Posit
Posit, PBC (formerly RStudio) creates software that helps individuals, teams, and organizations make better decisions with data. We believe the best analyses are correct, transparent, and reproducible, and that humans and AI work best together. Posit’s products, including Workbench, Connect, and Package Manager, power data science teams at thousands of organizations worldwide, from startups to the Fortune 500. Learn more at posit.co.

About Snowflake
Snowflake is the platform for the AI era, making it easy for enterprises to innovate faster and get more value from data. More than 13,300 customers around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest companies, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to build, use and share data, applications and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI are transformative for everyone. Learn more at snowflake.com (NYSE: SNOW).

Frequently asked questions

What is Posit Assistant? Posit Assistant is an AI agent for data science built into Positron on the Posit Team Native App for Snowflake. It connects to your full session context — data, environment, and active work — so data scientists can analyze, model, and build without leaving their IDE or Snowflake data perimeter.

Is my data safe when using Posit Assistant on Snowflake? Yes. Posit Assistant uses Snowflake Cortex as its LLM backend through zero-configuration integration with your managed credentials. All AI interactions stay within the Snowflake ecosystem and follow Snowflake’s governance guardrails. No external training or unauthorized use of your data occurs.

What is the difference between Posit Assistant and Positron Assistant? Posit Assistant is a new AI agent that will supersede both Positron Assistant and the Databot extension later in 2026, with general availability targeted by end of year. During the current preview period, users need to enable both tools to access Posit Assistant.

How do Posit Workbench session timeouts reduce compute costs? Administrators set an idle timeout threshold in the Workbench Manage page. Once a session is inactive for that period, Workbench automatically suspends or terminates it — preventing idle sessions from consuming compute credits overnight or over weekends.

How do I get started with Posit Team on Snowflake? New users can start a 30-day free trial of the Posit Team Native App directly from the Snowflake Marketplace with no sales call required. Existing customers receive these updates automatically.